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Article published In:
Language, Context and Text
Vol. 1:1 (2019) ► pp.39–64

An exploratory account of the register of nursing textbooks

Can you nurse from them?

ORCID logo | The University of Sydney

Given the pressing issues that affect nursing education (e.g. higher attrition and plagiarism rates), this study aims to obtain initial insight on whether nursing textbooks meet the demands of their context of situation. These demands could be listed as: construing biomedical knowledge, establishing a pattern of evidence-based nursing practice and promoting the values of person-centred care. For this analysis, I draw on aspects of parameters of context developed by Hasan (2004), Butt (2004) and Matthiessen (2015), and relate them to their semantic and lexicogrammatical realisation across different metafunctions using corpus-based techniques and detailed manual analysis of short extracts. The results may suggest that nursing textbooks may be meeting the demands of nursing as a research-based discipline but failing to model empathetic communication.

Keywords: nursing textbooks, context of situation, register, generic structure, technicality, a research-based discipline, empathetic communication, construal of knowledge, epistemological stance, narrative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Why focus on nursing?
  • 3.What is this discipline called nursing?
  • 4.A note on the modelling of context in SFL
  • 5.The construal of biomedical knowledge in nursing textbooks
  • 6.Epistemological stance in nursing textbooks
  • 7.Care, compassion and communication
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 4 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00003.gar
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