Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Areas
Language success doesn’t end with accomplishing basic literacy; students must be able to efficiently continue to build their literacy and expand their language abilities. Theorists are beginning to return to the basic building blocks of language in order to better understand how to improve comprehension and composition ability further down the line. However, secondary students are finding that the expectations placed upon them are progressing faster than their abilities currently allow. The current strategies being employed aren’t enough to close the gap.
Fang and Schleppegrell coin the term functional language analysis, which “enables students to identify language patterns and associated meanings specific to particular disciplines as they focus on how language works, helping them comprehend and critique the texts of secondary content-areas.” It categorizes text into three distinct but cohesive types of meaning: experiential, textual, and interpersonal. An analysis of these areas affords students a heightened awareness of which language to apply in a given context, as well as which patterns of language are bridged between disciplines.
Examining functional language analysis from an arts perspective, it can said that the development of technical or theoretical knowledge coincides with the development of the language that is used to describe it. In short: complex topics require complex language. I have certainly found this to be true in my own experience, and I believe that most anyone could relate to a situation with which they felt confined by the limits of their vocabulary to adequately express an idea, emotion, or experience. In art, we often like to consider how a work of art can articulate the ineffable: to express something that couldn’t be fully defined through language.
Fang and Schleppegrell go on to highlight several features of language in the secondary classroom, such as nominalization and multimodality. I find that the latter is the most readily applicable to the field of art education. Art is fundamentally multimodal in nature; it is constructed through various media and perceived in endless configurations. In my practice of art education, the use of multiple phrasings or analogies to critically frame a work is an invaluable tool in developing a thorough understanding.
Discipline-specific Academic language, as well as idioms, tone, and voice need to be explicitly taught in order for students to better engage with the material. Fang and Schleppegrell propose that the responsibility to raise student competency isn’t placed solely on literacy fundamentals, but that it is a ongoing process that is built into the study of each discipline.