This workbook is the culmination of a project initiated in the early 1980s by JimMartin and Clare Painter, who were joined in the endeavour by Christian Matthiessenin 1988. We three were all concerned to provide support materials for students andcolleagues who were learning the analyses proposed in Halliday's Introduction toFunctional Grammar. In particular we shared the experience of guiding studentsthrough familiar kinds of difficulties year after year - and wanted to prepare materialswhich would help learners through and around these experiences. We also wanted toprovide some support for people learning the grammar on their own, or without thedialogue provided by a critical mass of systemic linguists such as we enjoy in theSydney metropolitan region.

Since the publication of the first workbook titled Working with FunctionalGrammar in 1997, we have had the opportunity to use it with students, and to receivefeedback from many colleagues around the world. It became clear to us that weneeded to make a number of corrections and in some cases provide less confusingexamples. We were also keen to include a chapter on group and phrase analysis, whichfor reasons of space was excluded from the first edition; and we also wanted tointerface the grammar analyses considered here with discourse semantic systems, sothat their complementary roles in text analysis could be exemplified.

When negotiations with the original publisher along these lines broke down, wesecured the rights for the volume, and began exploring publication elsewhere. The Commercial Press has generously allowed us the additional scope we needed toamend the first edition with two additional chapters. We are delighted to bepublishing this second edition in China, where so much interest in functional grammarhas grown. Since IFG2 is still in print in China, we have accordingly cross-referencedthis edition to both the second and third editions of IFG.

We are of course much indebted to the many colleagues who have discussedaspects of these materials with us, to the many tutors who have dealt first-hand withproblems, and to the now thousands of students who have committed at least ahundred hours of their lives each to learning functional grammar in ourundergraduate linguistics and MA applied linguistics programs at the University ofSydney, Macquarie University, the University of Technology Sydney and the Universityof New South Wales.