Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), as a meaning-based theory of language, offers a robust framework for language learning and teacher education, particularly through its adoption within Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) frameworks in Europe and beyond (Hemmi & Banegas, 2021). Its success lies in bridging pure and applied linguistics (Xuan et al., 2024) and moving beyond siloed approaches to disciplinary knowledge. Yet, SFL remains largely confined to language classrooms and discourse analysis (Perez-Cañado, 2021; Wolff, 2012). This conceptual paper proposes that SFL, infused with critical sensibilities, can serve as an organizing principle for a broader teacher education research agenda.

Calls to extend SFL beyond language education are not new. Its attention to both content and context (Xuan et al., 2024) enables all teachers to understand the inseparability of language and subject knowledge. De Oliveira and Smith (2019) argue SFL equips educators and their students with conceptual tools to analyze language, making disciplinary norms explicit. Its pedagogical principles support both student literacy acquisition and teacher development. Research suggests that using SFL more broadly enhances teachers’ semiotic awareness, pedagogical knowledge, critical orientation, and confidence in disciplinary literacy instruction (Accurso & Gebhard, 2021; Troyan et al., 2021).

What remains underdeveloped is a research agenda that addresses the complex realities of today’s teacher education landscape. Teachers face new accreditation criteria, accountability systems, and standards (Cochran-Smith, 2021), along with multilingual classrooms (Bhatt et al., 2022) and increased pressure to produce scholarly work. Moreover, professional literacies now extend beyond classroom discourse to include digital and AI-mediated communication—for example, data reporting, online curriculum design, and academic writing using tools such as ChatGPT. These emerging practices raise new challenges in authorship, register, and modality. A critically oriented SFL framework offers the means to analyze and scaffold these literacies across teacher development contexts.

The European Framework for CLIL Teacher Education (Marsh et al., 2011) touches on some of these concerns but remains limited to formal multilingual education. While it promotes integrated curricular aims and authentic learning, its 4Cs model (Cognition, Community, Content, Communication) lacks the theoretical depth of SFL to address what Darling-Hammond (2021, p. 307) identifies as the core of teacher quality: “an understanding of content, pedagogy, and [...] meeting students’ diverse social, emotional, and academic needs.”

This proposal draws on two key SFL concepts: 1) the metafunctional dimensions of field, tenor, and mode, and 2) the teaching-learning cycle. Field refers to disciplinary knowledge; tenor to interpersonal relationships and roles; and mode to the organization of language across modalities. AI-assisted writing, for example, complicates all three—blurring authorship (tenor), reshaping content production (field), and hybridizing genres (mode). For example, when teachers use AI to draft reflective journals or scholarly articles, they must negotiate whose voice is being represented and how knowledge is constructed.

The teaching-learning cycle (Martin & Rose, 2008), grounded in constructivist pedagogy, guides learners to build knowledge, deconstruct texts, co-construct meaning, and create new texts independently. Integrated with critical literacy practices (Pandya et al., 2022), this model can extend beyond student learning to support teacher development across varied professional domains.

This paper outlines a research agenda that leverages SFL to explore how teachers engage with traditional and emerging literacies—including AI-assisted writing—as part of their professional practice. It calls for inquiry into how critical semiotic awareness develops, how identities are shaped through algorithmic mediation, and how teacher education programs can prepare educators for the communicative demands of contemporary educational systems.

In broad terms, this literacy-oriented framework aims to answer the guiding questions: What professional literacies enable teachers to 1) deliver a meaningful, interdisciplinary, multilingual educational curriculum and 2) participate in sharing professional knowledge through academic writing (e.g., synthesizing literature, or using AI)? A series of literacy-oriented questions can then be organized under the metafunctions of SFL, each enhanced with critically-oriented questions related to teachers’ social responsibilities (Pandya et al., 2022). Firstly, teachers need content and subject-related literacies related to field. Questions here relate to the discipline-relevant knowledge teachers, or “subject-specific literacies,” need to meet societal needs. Which communicative social purposes (e.g., informing, describing, analyzing, and persuading) are necessary? These questions emphasize the SFL principle that language and content are inseparable. A necessary critical dimension includes a) attention to historical knowledge and a re-valuing of indigenous ways of knowing, b) recognition of knowledge and language practices as multiple, dynamic, and fluid rather than static, and c) understanding how material surroundings mediate ideologically laden meaning-making processes. Second, teachers must attend to the tenor metafunction, which describes “relational literacies.” How do teachers navigate social life through audience awareness, register, and pragmatics, both with students and within their professional communities? Research about teacher identity construction, language socialization, and positioning relates to this metafunction, denoting the social nature of schooling. Criticality can be enhanced by attending to a) ideological becoming, b) activist participation in discourse communities, and c) multilingual and intercultural competence. Third, teachers need to consume and deliver multimodal teaching content, requiring technical and mechanical knowledge. Associated with the mode metafunction, these “delivery literacies” involve adapting teaching across a range of presentational to conversational modalities and leveraging available technological affordances. Along with this dimension, teachers should recognize how genres shift (as in the transition to web 2.0), enabling participatory public engagement. Research in this strand might critically address resource allocation and access, as well as how teachers use multimodal technologies to foster activist dispositions that disrupt unidirectional, monolingual communication. Finally, the teaching and learning cycle offers a frame for examining classroom practices from instruction to assessment. By prioritizing epistemological orientations of poststructuralist deconstruction and multiperspectival research, as well as constructivist social learning for change, researchers can (re)examine professional practices, instructional materials, and classroom norms to envision new ways of “un-learning, co-learning, and re-learning” (Bhatt et al., 2022, p. 434). Teachers' own use of AI, especially in writing, is ripe for investigation.

This conceptual paper addresses the challenge of coordinating fragmented research in teacher education and proposes how SFL—through the metafunctions of field, tenor, and mode, along with the teaching and learning cycle—can serve as a unifying framework for categorizing teacher knowledge and educational practices. We explore the extent to which the framework can scaffold research and training for both pedagogical and research publication purposes. Rooted in the understanding that language and content are inseparable, SFL provides a powerful lens for exploring professional literacies in education. The metafunctions of field, tenor, and mode illuminate the ways disciplinary knowledge, relational dynamics, and multimodal communication shape teaching and learning, while the teaching-learning cycle offers a constructivist framework for scaffolding teacher and student development. The presentation will illustrate sample research questions that fall under these dimensions, including how teachers navigate the interplay of language and content, adapt to new technologies like AI-assisted writing, build relational literacies, and adapt teaching and disciplinary discourse across diverse modalities. Furthermore, it will advocate for integrating a critical literacies lens to address issues such as the re-valuing of indigenous knowledge, multilingual competence, and equitable access to resources—concerns that are increasingly vital but remain underdeveloped (Hu, 2024). The session will conclude with an invitation for conference attendees to contribute to shaping a research agenda for teacher education. This includes identifying methods and tools to document and analyze the professional literacies discussed, as well as examining the policies and practices that enable or hinder their development. By leveraging SFL as a comprehensive framework, we can move toward a more cohesive and socially responsive approach to teacher education research.

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