LLED 360

The famed hawk moth and star orchid are truly the pinnacle example of species evolution and the drastic results that can arise under years of coevolution. Now for you non-bio people out there, this is a perfect example of the utmost need for vocabulary knowledge within a subject field. Without a vocabulary to fall back on you can’t even begin to comprehend the deeper take home message, which in this case is coevolution. Vocabulary is a tricky thing, it’s one thing to memorize a word based on its definition found on dictionary.com, its another thing to be able to apply that word correctly within the appropriate context. It is here that I believe a teacher should focus their energy the most when it comes tot he topic of vocabulary. I remember my teachers handing me “vocab lists” which I was expected to study diligently and regurgitate onto a quiz which simply said: “please define 10 of the 15 words”. After this quiz the words faded from my mind without a thought. This in itself lies the problem, whats the point of learning vocabulary, if your not going to use it. Its like telling someone to learn German and then never speak German to anyone, useless.

In addition to this point, a teacher should strive to make connections between words and challenge students on a regular basis with various exercises that require them to apply the vocabulary they learn to familiar and unfamiliar scenarios. Learning the definition of a word will give you no insight to the true meaning of the word, applying to real situations is what gives the word meaning and significance. By teaching a student this, you are building a vocabulary that they can use and will likely follow them through life. Even if they go on to do things complete opposite of the subject you teach, at the very least when that vocabulary is seen in newspapers, magazines, online or in books they can recognize its meaning and understand the context from which it comes. Giving them better insight in the world and allow them to perceive what they read with a more educated mind. BOOM!

“Just as birdwatchers are always on the look out for important birds, [teachers] must be on the lookout for key terms and phrases in [their] texts, tasks, tests, and talk (p.99).”

I enjoyed looking at various branches of academic language used in the four main school disciplines. Even though I’m in Business Education discipline, it was helpful for me to take a look the language used in math discipline since much of Accounting and Economics involves mathematical skills. Like math, accounting mostly involves solving problems, working with others to solve problems, and working alone to solve problems. The conversation between the Student F and teacher, however, made me realize that solving problems require as much language skills as mathematical skills. If the student does not understand the brick terms in a given problem, student will not be able to solve the problem, no matter how good he or she may be in math.

The the quote above made me reflect on my previous view in teaching Business courses. I associated Marketing with language skills and Accounting and Economics with mathematical skills. I realize that, despite which course we teach, we must always be aware of key terms and phrases in our teaching.

Zwiers mentions that she now does not remember the facts she learned in school, but the thinking skills she has acquired in school still serves her in a variety of ways – in courses, jobs, and life challenges. When I begin teaching, I want to go beyond teaching facts and equations – I want to teach my students critical thinking skills that will help them overcome challenges in life.

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

Chapters 1,2, and 3

Growing up in small towns in northern BC, I rarely interacted with kids whose first language was not English. Even my high school was fully comprised of English speakers, and it wasn’t until I graduated and started travelling that I discovered the discouragement that can arise when trying to overcome language barriers. Because of this background, I have realized I will need to be very cognisant of the language backgrounds of my students and careful to include the needs of English language learners in my classroom. I have found the first few classes to be highly informative and they have encouraged me to think about the way I personally use language on a daily basis, as well as consider the kind of approach I want to take towards language as a teacher. I found it especially helpful to reflect in class on how different I felt in situations when navigating outside the realm of my first language, and how I often felt like I was being left out of some sort of club. It will be important for me to remember those experiences as I begin to teach.

I am interested in how we as teachers can equip students with the language skills needed to succeed, while valuing and affirming their own language and culture. The text mentions that while we encourage their progress in English, we “must be willing to push back against society’s narrow-minded expectations (often evidenced through tests, writing samples, and grading practices) and limited perceptions of our students’ abilities” (Zwiers, 2008, p. 12). Because I am not very well acquainted with curriculum yet, I am curious just how much flexibility there really is when a teacher wishes to adjust grading practices to better work with ELL students.

The text gives practical examples that illustrate the way teachers can build their student’s understanding of academic language while encouraging participation. I would never want to discourage or shut down a student struggling to comprehend, but I can see how I could get frustrated in a large class with students of varying language abilities. The tools highlighted in the text will be very important in combating impatient responses like that, and while it will take time to put this into practice, I feel more confident having identified these different language techniques.

Zwiers, J. (2008). Understanding how students use language. In Building academic language: Essential practices for content classrooms (Ch. 1, pp. 1-17). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Time and time again this course surprises me. I never realized how important it is to focus on language in the courses we teach. So often in the biology world I feel so removed from the realm of language and rules of punctation etc (which is generally evident in a lot of undergraduate research papers). Yet when I reflect on my language use in biology I realize how different it is in comparison to how I write essays, or blogs, or letters or anything for that matter. I definitely take my language repertoire I have gained over my 5 years in biology. Scientific speech is extremely difficult to follow, very descriptive and highly subject-specific. I personally, with a background in evolution, find a molecular genetics or a biochemical paper extremely difficult to read versus an ecology based paper on angiosperm coevolution. The fact of the matter is, whether you’ve studied science, math, history, languages, art or any other course, you yourself are very familiar with your subjects vocabulary and you take for granted the time you have personally put into gaining this vocabulary and your ability to use this language in a professional and even social context.

It is for this reason that we must be so conscious of how we use our own “language” while teaching. I remember to this day, a very specific subject we were covering in high school biology. It was on genetic transfer between species over generations. I was so hopelessly lost! The teacher went on and on about this homozygous male breeding with this heterozygous female and they produce a mixture of blah blah blah. It wasn’t until second year university when I finally understood this concept in full and looking back on myself and thinking man I was dumber than a sack of hammers. However the main point to this story is that, you can’t learn a subject without first learning how to apply the vocabulary.

This course is opening my eyes to the great need of focusing learning on the language of science. At first it seems like its a lot of extra work in an already very busy curriculum, but i believe with the right attention and focus it will actually encourage your students, giving them confidence and a foundation to work off and flourish. Like beautiful little butterflies hatching from cocoons hahaha.

I like how this chapter discusses important thinking skills within each of the four disciplines. I also like how it informs teachers on how to help their students build on these skills by providing lots of excerpts of how other teachers scaffold their student’s learning. By examining the four disciplines in detail, the author allows teachers to get a glimpse on the variation of academic language that students face every day in other classrooms. Hopefully by realizing this, teachers may avoid stepping into their “expert blind spots” (69) and learn to take the extra time in developing lesson plans that will go over all necessary information in order for novices within their field to succeed. I agree with Zwiers when he claims teachers need to “[know] how novices think and struggle as they are learning the content” (70). Just as a history teacher would develop their students’ abilities in taking on different perspectives by being “able to think ‘in the shoes’ of another person” (83), it is just as important for teachers to place themselves inside their students’ shoes in order to figure out what they’re struggling with. Once teachers understand this, the process of devising a way of helping their students won’t be too difficult.

Last week we did our reading on vocabulary and how important it was.  While reflecting on this topic, I realized that as I child I had a lot of problems with vocabulary.  My problem was that I was a very visual person.  When people spoke to me I would visualize the words I was hearing to make sense of them.  However, this led to problems with the different forms of words.  If something was said to me orally then I wasn’t always able to figure out how to spell it.  In my mind there was a disconnect between the oral and print forms.  For example, I have a friend named Cedise.  I know this is an uncommon name, but nevertheless it is a name.  So when someone was telling me about the Cedise Sky High, I wondered if this highway was named after my friend.  A few years later I saw a sign that read Sea to Sky highway.  All of a sudden it clicked, for years I had been writing the Cedise Sky Highway because most people pronounce it the same as Sea to Sky highway.  (most people pronounce it sea-dis-ky).  As a result I realized that it would be very useful to not only speak new words but to also show how they are spelt!

Academic language can be adapted to many different uses. Each discipline uses its own discipline-specific variations of academic language. Sometimes the meaning of this language overlaps between disciplines, while in other instances it may carry an entirely different meaning. For instance, there are multiple uses of the word perspective in art, and although some of these uses may be similar to how it might be used when discussing science or history, there are certain uses that are entirely unique to the discipline. In addition to shared language, there is academic language that is entirely unique within a given discipline. It may eventually become so specialized within their discipline that it could become entirely unrecognizable to those outside the discipline.

Ensuring language competency cannot be the sole burden of English teachers but must be emphasized across all disciplines, a contemporary expectation that isn’t yet being universally adopted amongst educators. The danger is in that educators are experts in their discipline, and in many cases may overlook properly introducing complex language or its discipline-specific application simply because it seems rudimentary to them. It is crucial for educators to understand how students think and what they may be challenged by, and to become more aware of the way in which they reference existing language to explain new terminology.

In the language arts, the student’s ability to convey a literal understanding, to develop an intertextual reading, and to identify and explain recurring themes demonstrates understanding and thoughtful engagement by the student. In the language of history, it is used to establish context, content, and to interpret ideas and events from a particular time and to develop both a critical and empathetic understanding of how it is related to that which precedes and follows it. The language of science is often represented in ways that have little crossover with other disciplines. It is highly technical, empirical, objective, literal, well-organized, and hierarchical. The language of mathematics is perhaps the most distinct as it shares almost no academic language with other disciplines; it uses unfamiliar symbols and unusual methods of organization. It’s abstract nature makes it heavily reliant on a thorough understanding of prior concepts.

Academic language doesn’t always need to be overtly explained, and can often be inferred and reinforced in dialogue with students. Because of a lack of appropriate language to express an understanding, students will often provide fragmented answers to questions posed in the classroom. Demonstrating appropriate use of academic language specific to that discipline by neutrally rephrasing these statements is perhaps the most popular method to subtly develop academic language, and seems to be widely employed across many disciplines.

In many ways, language is more important than that which it describes. The books, facts, theories, and subjects will continue to change for students, but the specific language and the general linguistic ability that it develops will be a relatively static asset in sustaining an ongoing understanding of the world around them.

There are certain words that are used with great frequency that elude general definition. In the arts, perhaps there are no words quite as vague and yet loaded with meaning as the words creative, beautiful and abstract. What do these words mean to you? How do you use them in colloquial speech? In what ways are they used in your particular discipline?

To master using appropriate language in a certain subject area, students will first need to learn terminologies and concepts in that subject. It is essential for them to memorize words, use certain sentence structures, analyze unique ideas and express their own thoughts in particular patterns. Part of a teacher’s responsibility is to help them grasp all the above with scaffolding.

However, it does not stop just there. Rather than something used only in classrooms, language is supposed to be an inner ability which one will employ for every aspect of life. When a teacher teaches a subject, he or she should not only consider students’ language growth inside the classroom, but also think about how students can apply this newly acquired language growth in real life situations. For example, in a literature class a student may seem to understand theme and motif quite well, and he can identify these elements for an in-class reading, but one question remains for the teacher — is he able to do this only because there are so many hints and aid from the teacher and fellow students’ comments in the class, or can he actually utilize these concepts when he reads other literature in order to gain bigger satisfaction, reflect upon the social issue addressed in the work, or gain new perspectives for his thinking? Thus the teacher should always keep in mind that ultimately language growth is for helping the student become more competent.

It is also important to remember that language growths in each subject are not isolated. In a historical novel, the author may very well use a lot of real historical figures and events to make the illustration more vivid. Students without the proper language ability in history may have difficulty to comprehend the meaning because of lack of knowledge in background, timeline and social norms of a particular time. The same applies to scientific novels, popular science books, or even trivial things like bank statements (which will include basic math). It is the teacher’s job to remind students that they should constantly try to apply their language growth in as many fields as possible for their own benefits.

Chang Liu

In a nutshell, vocabulary is a fundamental part of reading comprehension. In other words, if you don’t know enough words, you are going to have trouble grasping what you read. On one hand, a few words you don’t know will not interfere with your comprehension significantly. However, if there are too many words you don’t know, comprehension will suffer. The sole purpose of reading is comprehending the content of the books or textbooks, therefore, too many not understood words will cause the reader to not comprehend the content.

Students with strong vocabularies are more successful in school than students with weak vocabularies. It is not wrong to say that people with strong vocabularies will be more likely to enjoy successful careers. This is true because words are in fact the tools not just of better reading, but of better writing, speaking, listening, and even thinking as well. The more words you have in your toolbox, the more effective  and even persuasive your communication/message can be.

In today’s society, a strong vocabulary is more crucial than ever before. This is so because there are fewer less people working in farms and factories. Thus, there are far more jobs that provide services and/or process information than in the past. More than anything else, words are tools of our trade: words we use in reading writing, speaking and listening. Furthermore, it not uncommon for people to change jobs and be promoted and learning new skills at an ever-increasing pace. Therefore, the key to success in this case will be the abilities to communicate effectively and learn quickly. In brief,  a strong vocabulary is mandatory for both of these skills.