Deciphering Academic Texts
Fang and Schleppegrell’s article highlights the importance of giving students the tools to identify discipline based language patterns, which will aid their overall academic comprehension. I found this article very practical and informative, because I just recently struggled with understanding the academic context of the word “affect” for one of my class readings. I had no previous understanding of the word, and when I looked it up, there was a different meaning provided for each context (philosophy, psychology, or linguistics) that was used. Because it was an art education paper, I still was not sure how to insert and interpret ‘affect’ in the article. About half way through the paper I was able to make use of the academic language tools I have learned over the years and associate ‘affect’ with its proper meaning within the art education lens.
Although an art class usually involves more hands on activities than literature, there is still important art history and theory reading that I would want to introduce to my students. This writing is typically subject specific and can be difficult to understand if the reader does not have a solid grasp on art vocabulary words before they begin. The structure that Fang and Schleppegrell suggest would be a great place to start when working with students to decipher academic texts, no matter the subject area. I appreciate that their approach is portable because it would give students the knowledge to work through texts in different subject areas on their own.
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. doi:10.1598/JAAL.53.7.6