Chapter 7
When reading chapter 7, in several moments I thought to myself that Zwiers was getting repetitive, since I felt I had already seen many of the claims the author makes. Nonetheless, as I looked more attentively to these claims, I realized that, in fact, they are also pointed out in the two articles we had previously read in this course: “Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Areas: Supporting Secondary Reading Through Functional Language Analysis” and “A Focus on Vocabulary”. While the first work regards the need for teachers to scaffold students into reading academic language (which is qualitatively distinct from their previous language foundations and therefore requires new skills), the second work conveys the positive or negative cycles that students may enter depending on their language abilities–and even suggests the same “analyzing words” and “looking at the context” techniques to expand vocabulary that Zwiers proposes (190). By looking at the two paragraphs of Zwiers conclusion (192), it is possible to identify the strong bridges between the first paragraph and the former article, as well as between the second paragraph and the latter article, which confirm the extent to which Chapter 7 greatly overlaps with these two works. This, however, certainly does not make this Chapter less important, since these are issues that ought to be constantly reflected upon by educators, and since the Chapter also contains new, and rather important, considerations, such as the oral scaffolds for academic reading (167).