What is it about?
Understanding how communication changes depending on the situation and culture is essential for sending a message clearly, both within one language and across languages. For this reason, students in Translation and Interpreting and in Communication and Public Relations at Politehnica University of Timișoara learn about genre and register using a systemic functional approach. This study looks at students’ opinions, gathered through an anonymous online survey, about a final project in which they analysed the register of a text representative of a specific genre. The survey results show that learning about genre and register through project work was helpful: it made the concepts easier to understand and supported the development of important professional soft skills.
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Why is it important?
This paper is important because it demonstrates that systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can be successfully taught and applied in academic contexts where it is not traditionally present, such as Romania, thereby expanding the visibility of SFL as a modern approach to discourse‑analysis teaching. It also shows that project‑based work helps students genuinely understand genre and register as practical tools for real communication tasks and supports the development of essential professional soft skills.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a real pleasure for us, as we are deeply passionate about teaching in general and about systemic functional linguistics in particular, especially when it is taught in a way that makes a real difference. The research results presented in the article confirm the value of integrating project‑based work into the teaching of systemic functional linguistics for undergraduate students, showing that this approach not only deepens their understanding of discourse variation but also equips them with the analytical awareness and communicative flexibility needed in real professional contexts.
Dr. Simona ȘIMON
Universitatea Politehnica din Timisoara
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Teaching register through projects, Language Context and Text The Social Semiotics Forum, December 2025, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/langct.00088.sim.
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