Representation of Students in Punjab Government Education Policy Documents: A Corpus-Based Transitivity Analysis

Abstract

The present study initially analyze the transitivity process types occur most frequently in the selected Punjab education policy documents, furthermore, it analyzes the ways of these process-type frequencies contribute to the representation of students within the policy discourse and lastly, it analyzes the that what educational priorities and meanings are reflected through the transitivity choices used in the policy documents. The research design used in this study was quantitative corpus-based research based on the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach. A corpus was used to identify and measure the frequency of transitivity process types (quantitative approach). The data was taken from the Punjab Education Sector Plan (PESP) 2019/20 –2023/24 provided by the Government of the Punjab. The texts were chosen using a purposive sampling and the corpus was imported into the UAM Corpus Tool for annotation and analysis. The results indicate that material processes are the most common type of process in the corpus, followed by relational. These two represent over 80% of all coded clauses. Less is seen with mental, verbal, behavioral and existential processes. The emphasis in this pattern is largely on action, implementation and system objectives as targets of the policy discourse. The results showed that educational policy is mainly conveyed in terms of action, institutional responsibility, and educational development.