Content Area Variations of Academic Language
Comments(1) 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.
Personally, I’ve never really experienced the lack of language clarification within subjects outside of Language Arts during my time in high school. Maybe because I was adapted and attracted to the bold texts in textbooks that get your attention to look at the back glossary to go over their definition if you don’t know the meaning. But I must agree with Zwiers in a sense that it makes the teacher’s lesson go a lot smoother/coherent if their students understood what’s unclear of them during class time rather than having them look over in the glossary when they go home and do their assignments.