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Abstract
As Vietnam increasingly participates in globalized professional environments where English functions as a working language, the demand for functional legal literacy in logistics has intensified. However, traditional EFL approaches often fail to prepare learners for the grammatical density of contractual discourse. Situated within an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) framework, this study proposes the “SFL Advantage” by examining transitivity patterns in international logistics contracts to support the development of professional communication competence. Based on a corpus of five commercial contracts (228 finite clauses), the research applies Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze experiential meanings.
The results reveal a consistent pattern within the dataset, characterized by the dominance of Material processes (52.6%) and Relational processes (38.2%), with no instances of Mental processes identified. A “Trigger–Action” mechanism was observed, in which Relational clauses encode conditions of liability that authorize subsequent Material actions. These findings suggest that shifting from lexically oriented EFL instruction to an SFL-informed ESP pedagogical model – focusing on process-type configurations – can enhance learners’ ability to interpret and respond to legal discourse. This functional approach offers a practical pathway for developing ESL-oriented professional competence in the context of globalized logistics.
Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, Legal English, Transitivity analysis, ESL-oriented competence, Logistics contracts
