Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis

Fang, Z., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2010). Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(7), 587-597. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.53.7.6

Background

There is a general belief that a proportion of students in the USA does not have the literacy skills to cope with the demands of subject areas and, as a result, have problems learning their subjects.

Aims

The authors describe an approach to teaching disciplinary literacy using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the starting point in the belief that subject area teachers could use this approach to help students understand subject texts. They call the approach ‘Functional Language Analysis’.

Sample

The authors analyse five school texts from Literature, Biology, History, Geometry and General Science.

Method

The authors demonstrate how students can be helped to understand the text features relevant to the language of subject areas using Hallidayan approaches to language analysis (SFL). Students can be taken through selected sections of text in detail and be asked to analyse it at the three levels of experiential (content, i.e. who/ what is involved and what is happening), textual (text structure) and interpersonal (style/voice) of SFL. The principle they advocate is that practice in analysing the detail will lead to the students being able to apply the analysis across other texts, helping them understand those texts.

Findings

The authors show that the text analysis will highlight language differences in different aspects of the text that reflect the content, purpose and context for which they are used. For example, in the context of science, definitions are often done through long noun phrases that contain a lot of information which ensures the precision and accuracy of the definition.

Implications

Applying the approach will involve subject teachers becoming familiar with the basic tenets of SFL. The authors believe the subject teachers could then work together with students to see how writers have used language to prepare disciplinary texts.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.