Examining interpersonal metaphor of modality in successful primary persuasive texts

Lexical metaphor is a familiar aspect of persuasive writing instruction in Australian primary schools. Another form of metaphor known as grammatical metaphor is far less commonly taught in school contexts, despite considerable research that describes it is a key feature of more advanced academic texts. This short paper adopted analytical frameworks from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to investigate how one type of grammatical metaphor — known as interpersonal metaphor of modality — was used by Tasmanian primary school students who wrote the 16 highest scoring persuasive texts for the 2011 National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) standardised writing test. The findings highlight how the high scoring primary school students used various types of interpersonal metaphor of modality to persuade readers, with particular differences across the Year 3 and Year 5 cohorts. The paper suggests that if primary school teachers teach their students about grammatical metaphor alongside lexical metaphor, this may assist young writers to better understand valued persuasive language features, and to make use of them in their writing.