LLED 360

According to Fang, the purpose of functional language analysis is to provide a metalanguage (“the language for talking about language”) to help students understand the choices that academic writers make as they write clauses, sentences and texts (p. 588). The metalanguage is especially important for ELLs in classes like science, history and mathematics where “technical and abstract vocabulary and sentences made up of embedded clauses that create a dense and compacted presentation of information” (p. 589). As a teacher candidate who has English as a Second Language as a teachable subject, I feel this article has several implications for my teaching. First, all teachers need to be conscious of the new language patterns in the disciplines with which the ELLs will be in contact. Fang says that the literacy development work cannot be the sole responsibility of the language arts teacher. Secondly, such a linguistic approach to academic text would enable the students to be critical of the text they are reading, as they gain a deeper understanding of how language is used to persuade the reader, legitimize scientific writing, and offer perspectives. On the one hand, I see how the ELLs could benefit from such linguistic analysis of academic writing. On the other, I am uncertain how such a seemingly detailed, sophisticated activity could be incorporated into a science or mathematics class without straying away from the main point of the lesson. While this approach can be useful, I am wondering how practical it is for the real world classroom.