Developing the 'code': empowering students to succeed in advanced academic English contexts

In an increasingly globalised world, university students are required to adapt to the demands of advanced English academic literacy and adopt the ‘code’ for the specific disciplines in which they hope to operate. To achieve these aims, successful learners develop the resources of grammatical metaphor (GM), a kind of linguistic ‘power tool’ that transforms grammatically intricate language into the cohesive and abstracted expression valued in academic contexts (Halliday, 1989; Martin, 2008; Schleppegrell, 2004). Despite the central role GM plays in advanced academic literacy, there are relatively few pedagogical resources available to teach GM, and arguably, very few studies have systematically investigated the teaching and learning of GM (e.g., Gebhard et al., 2014; Liardet & Black, 2020).
This talk will provide an accessible introduction to grammatical metaphor and demonstrate how it is used to expand the meaning potential of a language, enabling users to communicate ideas that would otherwise be difficult to express in congruent language. It will then introduce the Grammatical Metaphor List (GML), a systematically compiled list of 4,574 GMs identified in two specialised academic corpora, and describe how the GML can inform L2 writing instruction and expedite research into students’ development of GM (McGrath & Liardet, 2025).