Reflection: Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Area
I believe that Fang and Schleppegrell really hit the nail on the head (pardon the figurative language) when they urge educators to make discipline specific ways of using language explicit to their students in order to help them better engage with the knowledge presented to them at school and to help them develop literacies across academic content areas. I know I have experienced many moments during my undergraduate degree where the readings were saturated with academic language that was completely foreign to me and the sentences were so complicated I often had to read through them multiple times just to attempt a guess at their meanings. There is nothing like an unfriendly, structurally complicated sentence laced with jargon to make an individual’s eyes glaze over and turn them off of a subject.
In order to minimize these types of negative outcomes from getting students to interact with academic language, they need to be taught a way to successfully wade through all of the academia. I am very attracted to the functional language analysis discussed in the article because it appears to give students the tools they need to apply the approach on their own to multiple disciplines.
Because of the practicality of this approach across subjects, I would argue that developing these skills in students should not be the responsibility of teachers in any particular discipline but rather a team effort where all teachers do their best to show students how to make sense of the complex academic language that they will increasingly be presented with. Further to that, I do not believe that these are skills that students need to wait to reach secondary school to begin developing. It makes sense, to me, that students would begin to be familiarized with functional language analysis, or some other method, before the point in their education that they will have such a strong need for them. Perhaps middle school would be a more effective time to introduce students to these ideas so that they can have a strong enough foundation to easily adapt to the new rigors of high school. However, that is not to say that secondary school teachers should then have no responsibility for the development and solidification of these forms of analysis. When I say that the development of these tools should be a team effort, I mean that it should be so throughout the entirety of a students educational career in order to best serve the needs of the students.