The Systemic Functional Linguistics Interest Group (SFL Interest Group, or SFLIG in short) was first created on Facebook on the 12th of May in 2014 by Vinh To when Vinh was a PhD student in educational linguistics at the University of Tasmania, Australia. The purpose of this Facebook Discussion Group is to provide a forum for networking with other research students and SFL scholars, and to support those who are new to SFL, and have limited access to SFL resources and discussions with experts.
During May 2014 and July 2015, Vinh was the sole Admin of this professional group. In July 2015, Ahmar Mahboob joined as the second Admin. Yufei He and Dong Bing (Mus) Zhang joined the group as additional Admins in late 2018. Yufei served as one of the Admins for the group for one year (from late 2018 to late 2019). Ahmar served as an Admin for the Facebook Discussion Group until late April 2020.
Vinh actively promoted this group in different forums, and quickly built this group by creating different social flatforms for it including a Facebook Page, a Twitter Account, a Website, a Gmail Account, a YouTube channel, and a Mailing list within three weeks in late April and early May. Also in this period, Vinh did all preparations for the organisation of the first SFL webinar series from June to November 2020, with support from Mus Zhang for the registration in China and other admins and invited speakers for chairing the sessions.
Vinh also called for nominations for the Admin post in different continents and received interest from Kathryn Accurso, Eszter Szenes, Thomas Amundrud, Isaac N. Mwinlaaru, and Jacqueline Nenchin. The group has had international admin team members which represent different continents since 26 April 2020. Eszter served in her position for this group until November 2020. Marta then joined as a new Europe continent. Kathryn, Jacqueline, Thomas, Dong Bing, and Isaac have still actively contributed to SFLIG as North American, Asian and African representatives through the organization of the first international online Systemic Functional Linguistics Interest Group (SFLIG) Conference in November 2021 and the group’s ongoing activities. Vinh Nguyen joined the group in 2020 as ICT Manager and David Hicks joined the group in 2021 as data Manager.
Systemic Functional Linguistics Interest Group (SFLIG) 