LLED 360

I just re-read the chapter to refresh myself on the content and again I am struck by how “lucky” I was to have been brought up in a well educated, middle class home.  Given my personality, that I tend to take the path of least resistance, if I did not have that advantage I may not have gone as far as I have in school.  Thinking back, I feel that sometimes the only reason I passed some courses was my understanding and ability to use academic language.

I agree with the author’s conclusion that accepting the students’ language and teaching them academic English should both be done.  Accepting their language will engage the students in class and their work, meanwhile the use of academic language should encouraged as it will be needed further on in their education.

Tying this into more current readings, I see no reason why this could not be done with ELLs, assuming the teacher is fluent in the mother tongue of the students.  Though, if done in a class setting, more time should be given to the subject as the class becomes both a class of what ever the subject is and a language course.

As my instructor talked about how hard it is to understand mathematics if students are not familiar with the language it is being taught in, I recalled my own experience of my first day in Grade 10 math class just after I immigrated to Canada. I didn’t know what SOH CAH TOA was since I learned it in different language even though I’ve already learned trigonometry in Korea before I came. I asked my classmates who were in the same ESL class with me what SOH CAH TOA was, and their answers were “I don’t know either.” I was embarrassed about the fact that the activities of that entire class were about solving problems using SOH CAH TOA. My classmates who didn’t understand what SOH CAH TOA stood for were doing homework from another class. I asked my teacher what SOH CAH TOA was, and he explained that it is a way of remembering how to compute the sine, cosine, and tangent of an angle, and that each acronym stood for something, like SOH being Sine equal Opposite over Hypotenuse. Even after realizing what SOH CAH TOA is, I felt that it was difficult because “Hypotenuse” was a new vocabulary to me. My math teacher realized that I was having trouble with English, not with Math. So, before he started his lessons, he drew a triangle, and he labelled it as opposite, adjacent and hypotenuse to visualize it, and he tried to simplify the questions with easier words when I encountered the word problems in class. Also, before the beginning of each lesson he made a worksheet full of terminologies we were going to learn with definitions, so I would have easier time in becoming familiar with those terminologies. He didn’t only focus on teaching mathematics, but he also helped me to learn English. Only now can I truly appreciate how what a considerable teacher he was in being encouraging and patient with me. It also goes to show that language can be a real barrier in teaching math, but that it can be overcome with the right effort and attitude in both the instructor and the student.

I felt that chapter four in “Building Academic Language”, presented in a useful manner, the way each discipline uses language.  I have never thought in great depth about how each discipline uses language differently, but looking back at my own high school experience discipline specific language was of great importance.  From a young age I was very interested in Science, but in the later years of high school, I struggled with many terms relating to the discipline.  The part that struck me in the chapter was the statement that “too many schools see language development as the responsibility of the language arts or English teacher”.  This is a big problem, as I recall from my high school days, that language related to certain disciplines such as Science was definitely not taught in English class.  In regards to the section relating to History, it is important to give our students the skills so that they can think critically about past events that they will learn.  Our students must be able to take information from a variety of sources and then come to an idea of what they think really happened, rather than blindly believing what the text or teacher tells them.  Furthermore, Zwiers mentions the importance of interpretation in History, and how we must piece together clues from the past in order to come to an idea of what really happened.

I thought that Chapter 4, “Content-Area Variations of Academic Language” was a good way to get us thinking about the differences in language use across disciplines. Also, thinking about the use of language in our own disciplines is important, as so many of the terms or phrases we may use do not seem complicated or confusing to us since we are so accustomed to hearing and using them ourselves.  The idea of “expert blind spots” was a good reminder of how we need to be aware of our use of language in the classroom, especially when considering our ELLs.  We need to remember that ELL students are facing language challenges in all of their classes, not just ours, which means they are trying to make sense of and learn a variety of types of language that may not always cross disciplines. As a social studies teacher, I enjoyed reading the section on history and it really made me think about the range of opportunity within the social studies discipline for students to learn and use academic language.  For example, a major focus of history is analyzing and interpreting a variety of sources to put together the full picture of a historical event, a process that will give students the opportunity to think critically and find new meanings in academic language.

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

September 22 (sorry blog troubles)

I worry about the use of the English language and how it can create a de-valuing of certain students’ home languages when their mother tongue is not valued in school settings. I worry about the hierarchy that can be created and that students might not develop unique kinds of knowledge that are specific to their languages. This also has significant implications for the aboriginal population in Canada and how our institutions are in effect continuing with a colonization through language. As a visual arts teacher candidate I have a few ideas about how I could attempt to address some of these concerns in my own teaching practice. I think I would like to allow students to work in their visual journals through the planning process in their mother tongues. I think this would provide the opportunity to use the knowledge and experience they bring from their home language into their planning and process work and ultimately into their artwork.

Meghan Leeburn