LLED 360

This chapter on brick and mortar words definitely overlapped with my own experiences. As an English learner myself back when I was in secondary school, my most feared subject was social studies where much of the content was heavily based on the full understanding of both brick and mortar words. I remember having to go home and look up on my dictionary on almost every word I didn’t understand everyday. Even after so it was very difficult piecing the meanings of the brick words and mortar words together. Courses where other forms of communication were provided, such as diagrams, drawings, body positioning/acting made it easier for me to grasp concepts. As Zwiers suggests, it is important to supplement your oral descriptions with other connections. Subtle addition of hand gestures, using metaphors, or using prosody for emphasis in sentences will help learners receive hints of what the mortar words mean, and subsequently ease the learning of brick words. These added factors are not only to provide support for the English learners, but can also strengthen native English speakers’ ability to internalize the meanings of new brick words as well.

Other techniques mentioned in chapter 3 such as think-aloud have always been a part of my classroom learning experiences. I have never thought twice about the intention of teachers thinking aloud while explaining and modelling after how students are thinking. These actions serve a purpose to help students navigate their own reasoning at the same time. This just opens my eyes to the numerous ways of conveying concepts, messages, and reasonings.

“Demonstrating comprehension rather than learning to comprehend” (Fang, Shleppegrell page 588)

This quote from the text accurately describes what I think could possibly happen in many schools in many different ways.  In my time in the K-12 public system, the “fake it ‘till you make it” attitude was a common occurrence, except that often times, I never quite made it.  Grades are a fleeting demarcation of understanding, and often times I would learn things in the most rudimentary way, then quickly forget them.

What is the defining difference between academic and casual or colloquial language? Is it the sentence structure, the use of big words, the ability to understand metaphor, allegories, allusions, etc?  The way I think of narrative compared to academic language is a layered one.  I see narrative as something more surface, perhaps going for a stroll in a park and enjoying the sights and surroundings, whereas academic language is more comparable to being at a dig site; having to slowly and carefully uncover buried artifacts in order to find meaning. Within academic language it is important to understand the context, know the terminology, sometime historical background, decode symbols, and then be able to reconstruct the meaning in a way that makes sense.

I enjoyed how the text referenced academic language as being not only exclusive to literature, but including science and mathematics as well.  Within any discipline there is, in a sense, an un-coding of information.  That is to say learning to read, write, and speak in academic language is almost like a process of translation.  In the process you are not only learning to better understand in your own previously known language, you are also developing a more complex grasp on how these two language communicate ideas in a dis-synchronous way.

Kathy Zhang

Works Referenced

Fang, Z., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2010). Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53, 587–597.

Much of today’s presentation dealt with grasping the concepts of brick and mortar terms that are used throughout types of academic language. One of my teachable subjects is English, and it is extremely important in this subject to be clarifying brick and mortar words to our students. In English, bricks can be thought of as specific vocabulary used in literary analysis, such as genres, literary devices, types of poems, etc.

One of the activities our group of English teacher candidates came up with is a simple definition-matching game (which would also work great for other subjects, so feel free to adopt it). Students can be divided into groups of 3-4 and each is given a sentence or group of sentences on a piece of paper. Our sample sentence was, “In tragedy, conflict is often a theme.” Then, for each brick term (tragedy, conflict, theme) you prepare cards with the definitions written. Students then work in groups to match the brick words with the correct definition card. Groups can have the same or different sentences. As a class you can then go over the answers.

I think this a good way to introduce unfamiliar terms to students in a way that is more engaging than simply reading them off a glossary.

The difficulty arises when teaching mortar terms. In English, these are often linking words within a sentence, such as transitional words and conjunctions. One technique I can think of is to group words by similar meaning. (Ex. to show contrast: however, yet, still. To add on: furthermore, moreover, also.) Another way to clarify the meaning of these words is to try hand gestures as Zwiers (2008) mentions, though these may be unidentifiable to ELLs of other languages and cultures. Indeed, I think many of us would agree that it is the mortar terms that are most difficult to explain.

I found that Zwiers’ chapter on understanding how students use language made me think much more about the challenges in acquiring a language like English. I had the opportunity to teach English in Nepal in May, and that experience highlighted just how difficult English can be to use and understand. There are so many words that sound similar, and words that are the same but have different meanings depending on their context. While understanding the ‘bricks’ of language was an area of concern, my experience in Nepal highlighted that it is often the ‘mortar’ that is so much more confusing.

Sometimes it is hard to remember, at least for native English speakers, that much of how we construct sentences has been acquired through years and years of observation and mimicry. In working with English Language Learners I found that it can sometimes be difficult to know when or where to draw the line between evaluating the correct content of their speech or written work and evaluating how precise or correct their use of language was. If the student achieved the correct answer and used reasonably good grammar and sentence structure was that enough? Should consideration be given to their level of proficiency, and whether their current work was improved relative to their previous work? Should all students be marked based on the exact same standards? If your goal is to teach a specific subject matter, and the student demonstrates that they understand, how much weight or attention should be given to language quality?

In the end, I feel that it comes down to ensuring that students feel empowered and that they are capable of learning and improving. Different students respond in unique ways to a variety of feedback and marking styles, and strategies for improving their learning need to focus on the specific needs of the students, to the best of our abilities.

The insight presented in chapters 1-3 was incredibly informative but the detail through which it was delivered allowed me to appreciate the challenges presented. Specific examples given including figurative speech, sentence structure, and challenges associated with both brick and mortar vocabulary now allow me to become conscientious about particular aspects of my academic language.

I found it especially interesting the attention called to the multiple denotations and connotations associated with our routine language that we take for granted. It has encouraged me to work on ensuring that students understand these various meanings, can contextualize the word employment as well as understand any associated attached cultural and societal implications. I have learned to recognize my own cultural bias and can now begin to improve my awareness about assumptions made in my classroom. As soon as we take for granted a students ability to “read between the lines”, the student is no longer to follow the lesson and can quickly lose confidence entirely in being able to ever understand. At the same time, it is important to consider the students from various cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Remembering to not take for granted what I would consider typical family and home dynamics do not apply to every student is also needed when using various techniques for lessons and interactions.

Being able to balance instructional techniques to account for both students learning English as well as those from various cultural and socio-economic backgrounds is a skill essential for us as teachers to acquire.

Jeff Zweirs explains the role of academic language in his text on “Building Academic Language.” Academic language has the potential to be an incredible tool to aid us in communication, especially in the classroom. Unfortunately, it often leads to confusion and misunderstanding in both English language learners and native speakers with tragic frequency. Zweirs only covers the issue of clarity very briefly, but I believe clarity to be one of the largest barriers preventing youth from adopting academic language.

Unsurprisingly, academic language is used most heavily amongst academics, presumably more than any other population. Yet even within academia, mainstream English is the more comfortable of the two languages. Academic language is built upon a foundation of mainstream English, and no matter how advanced a given academic may be, it is still a learned register. In other words, academic language is a second language even to the most specialized and verbose of academics.

I would never argue that academic language is superfluous. We can use a single word to explain a concept that would otherwise take a great deal of communication to explain. It allows us to communicate concepts that are often abstract or complex in a more effective, concise, and salient manner. There is a tradeoff though: there exists a threshold where academic language ceases to be beneficial. In fact, it can be entirely counterproductive, decreasing the clarity, limiting the audience, and diluting the material. It is not necessarily an issue of vocabulary; even words that a well-educated person thoroughly understands may become overwhelming when packed into a single run-on sentence.

I wouldn’t necessarily argue that academic language standards need to be lowered across the board. It is simply my belief that academic language shouldn’t be used for its own sake; after all, we wouldn’t  say to a child: “Wouldn’t you like to relieve yourself in the lavatory?” We would simply ask “Do you need to potty?” When we use academic language, we must constantly be questioning our motives. Are we using a given term because we have enough experience in our field to know the specialized language required to describe it, or because we can actually use that term to better articulate ourselves to our audience?

I’ve created this fun graph to better visualize this notion. The main disagreement is upon when and where efficiency begins to decline.

An example of where I believe this ‘sweet spot’ can be found is with the celebrated TED series. Scientist, artists, and activists are able to effectively and concisely communicate their area of interest to one another, even when discussing very cutting-edge concepts, through the use of a very minimal amount of academic language. It is at a level that is likely universal amongst those with a basic, unspecialized secondary-level background.

In a post-modern world, what benefit is there to keeping this knowledge exclusive to our specialization, limiting the breadth of who can interpret and find meaning in what we are saying? I believe that the more we can communicate what we mean without losing our audience on the words we choose to express ourselves, the more culturally relevant our discipline can become.

In the chapter, Zwiers points out that the academic language for most teachers is their every language. Because university has gotten me more comfortable speaking in academic language, I may not able to pick out those big abstract words. For instance, the word “economy” has become part of my everyday language, and is no longer an abstract word. Like Zwiers emphasizes, we, teachers, must work on two dimensions – our own language and communication behavior and those of our students.

Another important aspect of academic language is that it is much more than memorizing the big words. Handing out a long list of vocabularies for students memorize for weekly quizzes is not sufficient to teach them the academic language. Students need to understand those words.  Many students simply memorize the new vocabularies, without understanding what they mean, without the ability to use these words in sentences. It is the responsibility of teachers to make sure that students understand the bricks and are able to use those bricks to express their ideas.

As a native speaker of mainstream English, I have found these chapters to be very revealing. One of my first revelations was the understanding of the great depth and breadth of the issues involved with the comprehension and use of academic English. I had not taken the time to fully explore all of the many ways in which the English language, especially academic English, can be confusing for English language learners. The uses of qualifying statements, prosody, clauses etc. present so many challenges that I now have an even greater respect for any level of success that ELL’s achieve on a daily basis.  I have also become much more aware of the ways in which I, unintentionally, may be confusing ELLs with my speech. It also helped me to identify the particular mechanisms that are breaking down when individuals who are ELLs seem to be having difficultly being understood and how I may be able to help repair those issues in an efficient way. Also, the first chapter clarified the way in which these seemingly minor difficulties in communication can have social and psychological ramifications that are much deeper than receiving a low grade.

However, the next few chapters have given me much hope. As a theatre teacher, it seemed like an onerous task to try to teach the content of my courses, as well as continually scaffolding the use of academic language. However, the strategies that are given are not unlike some of my current teaching methods. I believe, through some minor changes and deliberate planning, I can effectively teach, both academic language and content. For instance, analysing the way in which a particular character speaks and how this reflects their thinking are essential parts of an actor’s preparation for a role. Therefore, discussing metalinguistic and metacognitive processes can be easily done in relation to course content. Furthermore, theatre emphasises using the whole body and voice to communicate and is not limited to the verbal realm. Therefore, students who are experiencing language difficulties may feel safer and freer to express themselves in these ways. Consequently, I, as well as their fellow students, will be better able to scaffold their language development, as we assist them in finding the right academic language to express the ideas they have presented.

There are many more examples of the many ways I have been inspired to bridge the content of my courses with the acquisition of academic language and I am excited to try them out with students in the field.

Something that appealed to me from the third chapter titled “Cultivating Academic Language Acquisition” was the section describing the use of gestures and facial expressions as tools to demonstrate the meaning of language. I am a huge advocate of using physical movement in education, and I am intrigued by the notion of intentionally using it as a tool to promote learning.

I’m familiar with the natural tendencies to use gestures and facial expressions, being a person that “talks with my hands” frequently. I’m encouraged by the idea of making a conscious effort to utilize these tactics the same way visual aids would be used in the classroom. Zwiers explains how one teacher “often emphasized the words however and yet as she moved one hand in an arc in the opposite direction” (Zwiers 49). I can appreciate this action as a powerful way to reinforce meaning thereby aiding in the acquirement of academic language. It also seems to be a relatively simple way to enrich any lesson plan. Whether I am in the drama class or the English class, there will always be a certain amount of time given to lecturing and facilitating discussion. If I can plan to incorporate the use of gestures and facial expressions into my part of the discussion, it will surely provide one extra layer of communicating language use in a fairly efficient manner.

As I am typing this response, I have become very self-conscious of the words and organization of this blog post. I found this chapter fascinating as I am highly interested in the “invisible” and “hidden” curriculum in the classroom––and the very language we use in school does need to be critiqued and explored. Despite being an English Language Learner from an immigrant Taiwanese family, it is difficult to recall exactly what it felt like to grasp and pick up a new language when I was in my younger years. By now English has become my dominant language. Yet it is interesting to reflect on my experiences, and the experiences of some of my friends who had more difficulty grasping “academic English.” I find it particularly troubling that some students “remain underneath our radar” because it appears at first glance that they are getting by adequately (Zwiers, 2).

I found Zwiers discussion on academic entrapment as a good warning that I wish to internalize early on in my teaching career. I do not want to demand of my students what I do not teach them––and to especially do this subconsciously and through the mode of language. I hope that I can do my best to acknowledge what my students already know and what they bring into the classroom, and then come together and agree on what is important in what we are studying. As Zwiers highlights, the shifting that occurs between students’ experiences and the subject/text is important––and I want to be able to use language effectively to do that well.

After reading the section on the types of academic capital, I hope to invest some of my time and energy to engage with the students’ families and parents. Despite the varying familial and home circumstances that students come from, to the best of my ability I want to be a teacher that can get the parents involved and excited about what their children are learning. It appears that so much learning happens outside of the classroom (such as in homes, among social networks, religious traditions, cultural spaces) and language is the avenue in which all that learning travels. So I hope to help my students become more cognizant of the way they are speaking and the words they are using.

Michael Yang