LLED 360

Since LLED 360 first began I had been wondering exactly what the course would be about. It wasn’t until last classes demonstration that I started to have glimpses of what it was all about. The demonstration was to partner up with another classmate who was not in your same cohort and try and get them to draw something that was related to your specific field of expertise. I being a Theatre cohort paired up with a student from Social Studies. He had asked me to draw China and I had asked him to draw a Proscenium Arch. The amount of struggle, although it was fun, was surprising! I did not think it would be such a challenge to essentially have my partner draw a wall with a large hole in the middle and I knew this was because of my inability to effectively convey what I was trying to describe. After class I had reflected on the class and understood that situations would often arise like these and that was a hurdle that I will have to deal with. I just did not know how often these situations would occur and it couldn’t have been more apparent the following day.

After a class the following day a large group, which included myself, met outside to discuss a video project that we were going to work on. The group comprised of two different cohorts, Theatre and English. One classmate, whom is a fellow theatre student teacher, was discussing with the group on how we should organize the video sequences and to do that a storyboard would be an effective way to organize. As he spoke he paused briefly and asked, “does everyone know what a storyboard is?” As he was speaking I had understood all the terminology he was referring to being immersed in it myself and did not think twice about whether or not others knew as well. I responded to his question, “yes” as did others from the theatre group but everyone else remained silent! No one knew! It blew me away! I also thought it was great that the gentleman speaking could sense that others were confused by what he was saying and took the time to make sure everyone was on the same page.

It was a simple situation outside the classroom and controlled demonstrations that I really began to understand what LLED 360 will be about and the effectiveness it will have on me as I pursue my goal to become a Theatre teacher! Looking forward to the year ahead and the challenges it will bring! Even if it is just describing what a Proscenium Arch is.

As a biology teacher, I am well aware that this discipline requires secondary students to understand and develop a large repertoire of scientific terminology that may be completely novel to them. Along with this accumulation of technical vocabulary, students are also expected to understand complex concepts and relationships which are typically presented in densely packed language. In this respect, Fang & Schleppegrell’s (2010) suggestion for teachers to walk their students through academic language patterns specific to the discipline is effective in promoting student learning in the long run. In my future classroom I hope to incorporate periodic lessons focusing specifically on how to effectively read academic texts through using literacy exercises similar to the ones provided by Fang & Schleppegrell (2010).

In one of my undergraduate linguistic courses, we were introduced to Functional Language Analysis and initially, because the concept was foreign to us, we found it to be quite difficult. However, breaking the language down into workable pieces allows more efficient processing of information; once a student masters this procedure of breaking down dense text into small sections, he or she would be able to apply this technique across disciplines which would serve as a catalyst for further development in academic literacy.

Something I have found students struggle with in particular in understanding academic text is the use of synonyms or synonymic phrases to describe the same thing. Often these struggling students only need to be made aware that this is an academic technique used to avoid repetition and to introduce new vocabulary (usually in the form of a nominalization). If students are more aware of this pattern, they may be more conscious of these equivalent pieces of information when they read, allowing for more efficient information processing and organization.

Lucy Yang

After reading the article “Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis,” I was reflecting on how I could adopt the ideas and methods of functional language analysis in an art classroom. I am always looking for ways to connect my learning to practicalities in my own disciple. The reality is that there is not a lot of reading that happens in an art curriculum. Most of the focus is on the production of art. When I think about the challenges a secondary student might face in my classroom as an ELL, I can predict that it would be with expressing themselves verbally when critiquing art and understanding others in the same way. Another difficulty might come if I ask them to produce some written work in response to their art.

As I was reading the article I translated some of the recommendations into possibilities for developing language within the space of an art critique. Specifically, I will deconstruct table 1 on page 593. This table suggests the process of working through functional language analysis. It asks the reader to analyze the content, organization and style of the author. The same can be done for a work of art. A student can look at the experiential meaning of a piece through the who, what, where, when and why presented in the content. Secondly, the textual meaning can be deconstructed through the specific use of design principles in the composition. Thirdly, the impersonal meaning can be explored though the style choices and cohesive mood expressed by the piece.

A piece of art can be read in a similar way to a piece of writing. As an art teacher it will be my goal to build the academic language of my students through the use of a format like this in a critique, and the gradual introduction of brick and mortar words that the students can use to express themselves both verbally and textually.

I believe that Fang and Schleppegrell really hit the nail on the head (pardon the figurative language) when they urge educators to make discipline specific ways of using language explicit to their students in order to help them better engage with the knowledge presented to them at school and to help them develop literacies across academic content areas. I know I have experienced many moments during my undergraduate degree where the readings were saturated with academic language that was completely foreign to me and the sentences were so complicated I often had to read through them multiple times just to attempt a guess at their meanings. There is nothing like an unfriendly, structurally complicated sentence laced with jargon to make an individual’s eyes glaze over and turn them off of a subject.

In order to minimize these types of negative outcomes from getting students to interact with academic language, they need to be taught a way to successfully wade through all of the academia. I am very attracted to the functional language analysis discussed in the article because it appears to give students the tools they need to apply the approach on their own to multiple disciplines.

Because of the practicality of this approach across subjects, I would argue that developing these skills in students should not be the responsibility of teachers in any particular discipline but rather a team effort where all teachers do their best to show students how to make sense of the complex academic language that they will increasingly be presented with. Further to that, I do not believe that these are skills that students need to wait to reach secondary school to begin developing. It makes sense, to me, that students would begin to be familiarized with functional language analysis, or some other method, before the point in their education that they will have such a strong need for them. Perhaps middle school would be a more effective time to introduce students to these ideas so that they can have a strong enough foundation to easily adapt to the new rigors of high school. However, that is not to say that secondary school teachers should then have no responsibility for the development and solidification of these forms of analysis. When I say that the development of these tools should be a team effort, I mean that it should be so throughout the entirety of a students educational career in order to best serve the needs of the students.

The topic I found interesting is the features of academic grammar. I remember that uneasy feeling I experienced first year in undergrad when I began to read the academic textbooks, articles and papers. It took a number of years for me to become accustomed to reading academic writing. The features of academic writing are long sentences, passive voice, nominalization and condensed complex messages. Students need to be taught to break down clauses and to focus on the main point of the sentence. While I believe it is important for ELL learners who are just starting to learn English to be aware of how clauses function, I would not choose readings that involve strings of clauses just to get them warmed up. I feel that would likely frustrate them, just as I was. We need to gradually increase the doses of clauses and not overburden the ELLs right off the bat. Besides, I personally feel some long sentences are simply unnecessarily complicated. Complex sentences with a lot of subordinating conjunctions can be broken down into smaller parts. The point is whatever subject(s) we teach, our lessons (and choice of text, especially for English class) need to adjust to the student’s level of academic language; the lessons need to be student-centered.

When I reached third year, I met this English professor who discouraged us to use the passive voice because, according to her handout, her “attention span is restricted by this practice” since “it is used to make the paper sound as though it is written with authority”. She points out the actual effect of using the passive voice is putting the reading process in slow motion. I cannot agree more. So there, even professors who use academic language do not necessarily all agree on the taken-for-granted rules!

Nominalization is wonderful. As the text says, the purpose is to pack higher levels of abstraction into one sentence. I feel it is important for ELLs to learn how verbs and nouns convert to adjectives, and also how they are nominalized. They need to be aware of the different forms of a word in order to extract the abstract meanings packed in the sentence.

Finally, I like this quote: “Students can try to be overly academic at the expense of clarity. We all have seen papers and books whose authors have overcomplicated the language of a text or speech to the point of sounding pretentious or stilted. They use sentences that are too long, they use too many clauses and ‘SAT words’, and the message ends up being too concentrated or muddy to make sense to the reader or listener.” (p.39). Our objective in teaching ELLs academic language is not to have them embellish their writing with unnecessary clauses and dangling nominalized terms that obscure the meaning. Our objective is help them to express their ideas, logic and thoughts with clarity and precision, whether on an academic paper or in formal oral speech.

This chapter on brick and mortar words definitely overlapped with my own experiences. As an English learner myself back when I was in secondary school, my most feared subject was social studies where much of the content was heavily based on the full understanding of both brick and mortar words. I remember having to go home and look up on my dictionary on almost every word I didn’t understand everyday. Even after so it was very difficult piecing the meanings of the brick words and mortar words together. Courses where other forms of communication were provided, such as diagrams, drawings, body positioning/acting made it easier for me to grasp concepts. As Zwiers suggests, it is important to supplement your oral descriptions with other connections. Subtle addition of hand gestures, using metaphors, or using prosody for emphasis in sentences will help learners receive hints of what the mortar words mean, and subsequently ease the learning of brick words. These added factors are not only to provide support for the English learners, but can also strengthen native English speakers’ ability to internalize the meanings of new brick words as well.

Other techniques mentioned in chapter 3 such as think-aloud have always been a part of my classroom learning experiences. I have never thought twice about the intention of teachers thinking aloud while explaining and modelling after how students are thinking. These actions serve a purpose to help students navigate their own reasoning at the same time. This just opens my eyes to the numerous ways of conveying concepts, messages, and reasonings.

“Demonstrating comprehension rather than learning to comprehend” (Fang, Shleppegrell page 588)

This quote from the text accurately describes what I think could possibly happen in many schools in many different ways.  In my time in the K-12 public system, the “fake it ‘till you make it” attitude was a common occurrence, except that often times, I never quite made it.  Grades are a fleeting demarcation of understanding, and often times I would learn things in the most rudimentary way, then quickly forget them.

What is the defining difference between academic and casual or colloquial language? Is it the sentence structure, the use of big words, the ability to understand metaphor, allegories, allusions, etc?  The way I think of narrative compared to academic language is a layered one.  I see narrative as something more surface, perhaps going for a stroll in a park and enjoying the sights and surroundings, whereas academic language is more comparable to being at a dig site; having to slowly and carefully uncover buried artifacts in order to find meaning. Within academic language it is important to understand the context, know the terminology, sometime historical background, decode symbols, and then be able to reconstruct the meaning in a way that makes sense.

I enjoyed how the text referenced academic language as being not only exclusive to literature, but including science and mathematics as well.  Within any discipline there is, in a sense, an un-coding of information.  That is to say learning to read, write, and speak in academic language is almost like a process of translation.  In the process you are not only learning to better understand in your own previously known language, you are also developing a more complex grasp on how these two language communicate ideas in a dis-synchronous way.

Kathy Zhang

Works Referenced

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.

Much of today’s presentation dealt with grasping the concepts of brick and mortar terms that are used throughout types of academic language. One of my teachable subjects is English, and it is extremely important in this subject to be clarifying brick and mortar words to our students. In English, bricks can be thought of as specific vocabulary used in literary analysis, such as genres, literary devices, types of poems, etc.

One of the activities our group of English teacher candidates came up with is a simple definition-matching game (which would also work great for other subjects, so feel free to adopt it). Students can be divided into groups of 3-4 and each is given a sentence or group of sentences on a piece of paper. Our sample sentence was, “In tragedy, conflict is often a theme.” Then, for each brick term (tragedy, conflict, theme) you prepare cards with the definitions written. Students then work in groups to match the brick words with the correct definition card. Groups can have the same or different sentences. As a class you can then go over the answers.

I think this a good way to introduce unfamiliar terms to students in a way that is more engaging than simply reading them off a glossary.

The difficulty arises when teaching mortar terms. In English, these are often linking words within a sentence, such as transitional words and conjunctions. One technique I can think of is to group words by similar meaning. (Ex. to show contrast: however, yet, still. To add on: furthermore, moreover, also.) Another way to clarify the meaning of these words is to try hand gestures as Zwiers (2008) mentions, though these may be unidentifiable to ELLs of other languages and cultures. Indeed, I think many of us would agree that it is the mortar terms that are most difficult to explain.

I found that Zwiers’ chapter on understanding how students use language made me think much more about the challenges in acquiring a language like English. I had the opportunity to teach English in Nepal in May, and that experience highlighted just how difficult English can be to use and understand. There are so many words that sound similar, and words that are the same but have different meanings depending on their context. While understanding the ‘bricks’ of language was an area of concern, my experience in Nepal highlighted that it is often the ‘mortar’ that is so much more confusing.

Sometimes it is hard to remember, at least for native English speakers, that much of how we construct sentences has been acquired through years and years of observation and mimicry. In working with English Language Learners I found that it can sometimes be difficult to know when or where to draw the line between evaluating the correct content of their speech or written work and evaluating how precise or correct their use of language was. If the student achieved the correct answer and used reasonably good grammar and sentence structure was that enough? Should consideration be given to their level of proficiency, and whether their current work was improved relative to their previous work? Should all students be marked based on the exact same standards? If your goal is to teach a specific subject matter, and the student demonstrates that they understand, how much weight or attention should be given to language quality?

In the end, I feel that it comes down to ensuring that students feel empowered and that they are capable of learning and improving. Different students respond in unique ways to a variety of feedback and marking styles, and strategies for improving their learning need to focus on the specific needs of the students, to the best of our abilities.

The insight presented in chapters 1-3 was incredibly informative but the detail through which it was delivered allowed me to appreciate the challenges presented. Specific examples given including figurative speech, sentence structure, and challenges associated with both brick and mortar vocabulary now allow me to become conscientious about particular aspects of my academic language.

I found it especially interesting the attention called to the multiple denotations and connotations associated with our routine language that we take for granted. It has encouraged me to work on ensuring that students understand these various meanings, can contextualize the word employment as well as understand any associated attached cultural and societal implications. I have learned to recognize my own cultural bias and can now begin to improve my awareness about assumptions made in my classroom. As soon as we take for granted a students ability to “read between the lines”, the student is no longer to follow the lesson and can quickly lose confidence entirely in being able to ever understand. At the same time, it is important to consider the students from various cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Remembering to not take for granted what I would consider typical family and home dynamics do not apply to every student is also needed when using various techniques for lessons and interactions.

Being able to balance instructional techniques to account for both students learning English as well as those from various cultural and socio-economic backgrounds is a skill essential for us as teachers to acquire.