LLED 360

After reading the article “Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis,” I was reflecting on how I could adopt the ideas and methods of functional language analysis in an art classroom. I am always looking for ways to connect my learning to practicalities in my own disciple. The reality is that there is not a lot of reading that happens in an art curriculum. Most of the focus is on the production of art. When I think about the challenges a secondary student might face in my classroom as an ELL, I can predict that it would be with expressing themselves verbally when critiquing art and understanding others in the same way. Another difficulty might come if I ask them to produce some written work in response to their art.

As I was reading the article I translated some of the recommendations into possibilities for developing language within the space of an art critique. Specifically, I will deconstruct table 1 on page 593. This table suggests the process of working through functional language analysis. It asks the reader to analyze the content, organization and style of the author. The same can be done for a work of art. A student can look at the experiential meaning of a piece through the who, what, where, when and why presented in the content. Secondly, the textual meaning can be deconstructed through the specific use of design principles in the composition. Thirdly, the impersonal meaning can be explored though the style choices and cohesive mood expressed by the piece.

A piece of art can be read in a similar way to a piece of writing. As an art teacher it will be my goal to build the academic language of my students through the use of a format like this in a critique, and the gradual introduction of brick and mortar words that the students can use to express themselves both verbally and textually.