A couple of things that I want to add:
I’m not saying that language structure teaching is really necessary – it’s clearly not required for linguistically competent communication as everyone knows – but if it’s done at all, it certainly shouldn’t be done with such an inappropriate framework.
Also, teaching English structure shouldn’t really go into heavy detail, so I’m not advocating teaching the independence of form and function as the basis of language or anything, but just using it to show how deficient this quasi-SFL framework is for its intended purpose. This is also what I think Huddleston was doing in his reply to Ferguson’s guidelines, rather than advocating a highly formal, complex syntactic framework for English teachers.

Hey, did you like the title? I put a lot of thought into that! I thought it appropriate since Latin is, I guess, the patron language of prescriptive grammar. Maybe I was way off.

It strikes me that SFL appears to be a tool for semantic (“functional”) analysis, not syntactic/morphogrammatical (“structural”) analysis at all. Descriptions obtained using these two approaches may be partially correlated some of the time, but are not necessarily so: these are quite different, complementary aspects of a text.

Your example demonstrates the difference nicely, with the choice of “eating” as opposed to “capable” as the core of the Complement Phrase.

It is still inexcusable that someone, regarded as enough of an expert in the area to write the definite Teachers’ Guide, should have confused these two frameworks and their terminologies.

The callers mainly wanted to complain about the mis-use of prepositions and poor spelling etc (such a wasted opportunity for a real discussion about this issue!), and the guests wanted to have a slinging match over teaching SFL (or other descriptive approaches) compared to more traditional, prescriptive approaches.

As I’ve noted before, people really care about language. I couldn’t get through on the phone. But even better than me venting my spleen, they spoke to Andy Butcher, who made several brilliant points. Firstly, not being taught grammar does not render one unable to use language. Secondly, learning about grammar does not necessarily render one able to write clearly or coherently. While it is a very meaningful activity to learn about the grammatical structure of one’s own language, or the grammar of other languages, according to Andy, this does not translate to his students producing good written work. Unfortunately. Thirdly, writing is highly genre specific, and requires training. That is, training other than general awareness-raising about grammar. Typically this training should be prescriptive, not least because others will hold us to certain common genre-specific markers, and judge us if we fail to use them appropriately.

I consider myself a living testimony to Andy’s points. Despite doing well during my undergraduate study in linguistics, it wasn’t until I began Honours and went through the process of having my supervisor critique my writing and help me re-draft it, that I really understood what ‘good writing’ was. *Knowing* about grammar is quite different to *writing well*.