I found this chapter very helpful to think about my own use of language and questions. I was particularly interested in the author’s criticism of teacher questioning and the way in which questions are overused and often rhetorical. I think that this is probably common for teachers because of their experience as a student. It is a kind of default teacher way of speaking. Building academic language for my discipline, Visual Art, I think would be as challenging as with the examples in the language arts, science and mathematics but because the output or assignments are expressed as a visual literacy rather than a linguistic one, we might overlook the language element and neglect to build up our student’s academic language. While the emphasis on visual rather than written in art may be welcoming for English language learners, I think art has a special ability to strengthen language in that it is inherently multimodal and connections with visuals, ideas and language can be strengthened.
Meghan Leeburn