Response to Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Area
As I was reading through this article I had a flashback to my first year at UBC. In one of my Art Studies courses, the theme of the course was on global citizenship and identity. The second reading was one of the densest I have ever read. It was so convoluted and about borders and international law, a topic that we were not familiar with at the time. I remember my professor took great effort and care to make sure that my fellow students and I could decipher and navigate through the dense and thick forest of academic jargonese that we had to wander through. She taught us not only how to navigate through it, but to “handle language in new ways” as the article says, so that we could write and speak in a way that illustrated our grasp of the language. She essentially was engaging in a form of Functional Language Analysis (FLA), particularly focusing on those three dimensions of experiential, textual, and interpersonal meaning. The effort our professor put in was well worth it as it laid the groundwork for the rest of my undergraduate career, but also in all the reading and analyzing I would do in my daily life. Therefore I can see how important FLA can be for secondary classrooms too, as students begin to encounter academic language and articles.
As a Social Studies teacher candidate, I would want my students to always be aware and familiar with the ins and outs of language. I think in my experiences earlier on in high school, much if not all the textual exploration we had was focused on deciphering the experiential meaning. Over time however, I learned to grapple and grasp the textual and interpersonal meanings as well. Therefore I wish to be able to teach my students how to do this, to realize the importance of “who is doing the story telling” or “how does the author seek to influence the reader” as important and consistent questions to ask. I want to be able to do this with their own writing. I think by learning how to create language and use language in these multidimensional ways––it will better teach them how to read language. As they engage in textual deconstruction, they also learn how to masterfully engage in language construction. And I hope I can be a co-constructor with them in the beginning phases as they find their own methods and voice.
Michael Yang