LLED Blog Post: Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Areas
“Demonstrating comprehension rather than learning to comprehend” (Fang, Shleppegrell page 588)
This quote from the text accurately describes what I think could possibly happen in many schools in many different ways. In my time in the K-12 public system, the “fake it ‘till you make it” attitude was a common occurrence, except that often times, I never quite made it. Grades are a fleeting demarcation of understanding, and often times I would learn things in the most rudimentary way, then quickly forget them.
What is the defining difference between academic and casual or colloquial language? Is it the sentence structure, the use of big words, the ability to understand metaphor, allegories, allusions, etc? The way I think of narrative compared to academic language is a layered one. I see narrative as something more surface, perhaps going for a stroll in a park and enjoying the sights and surroundings, whereas academic language is more comparable to being at a dig site; having to slowly and carefully uncover buried artifacts in order to find meaning. Within academic language it is important to understand the context, know the terminology, sometime historical background, decode symbols, and then be able to reconstruct the meaning in a way that makes sense.
I enjoyed how the text referenced academic language as being not only exclusive to literature, but including science and mathematics as well. Within any discipline there is, in a sense, an un-coding of information. That is to say learning to read, write, and speak in academic language is almost like a process of translation. In the process you are not only learning to better understand in your own previously known language, you are also developing a more complex grasp on how these two language communicate ideas in a dis-synchronous way.
Kathy Zhang
Works Referenced
Fang, Z., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2010). Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53, 587–597.