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Academic Language: A Helpful Metaphor
"Bricks, Mortar, and Buildings" is a nine-minute video that presents a metaphor for academic language by the same title (Benegas & Stolpestad, 2019). This metaphor will also be used to assist in identifying the academic language needs of your instructional sequence and learning goals. Determining the academic language demands related to the lesson objective is a very important step in planning for the success for all learners.
Additionally, "Building with Bricks and Mortar" can be a strategy used to clearly orientate students to the academic language needed for success in meeting the instructional learning objective. The linked "Building with Bricks and Mortor" (7 min) on-line instructional video demonstrates how this same metaphor could be adapted for use in multiple contexts to identify and communicate the needed academic language for the instructional goal in a student-friendly way.
Function: Revisited
To learn and express understanding of content, students need to be taught the purpose or function of the language for the particular lesson task. Functions of language refer to what the language is used to perform. Often the function is a part of the lesson objective. The function most often indicates the purpose of the cognitive, communicative, and/or physical action.
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Use the above list to check off which "function" your students will be performing to successfully complete your most crucial lesson objective.
Form: Revisited
A commonly used metaphor for the academic language term "form" would be that of the bricks used to build a building or architectural structure, as discussed in the video "Bricks, Mortar, and Buildings". We can further extend the metaphor by imagining that these "bricks" are created by all the things that make up words. How do you make bricks? Well, you must combine clay and water within a frame or brick form before baking it. In a similar fashion, the building blocks of the term "form" in academic language include the sounds of words (phonology), the meaning of words (semantics), and the parts of words (morphology).
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- Form: Phonology (word sounds) = _______________________________ (commonly misheard word from your content area; includes misspelled words)
- Form: Semantics (word meaning) = ______________________________ (commonly misapplied or misunderstood word from your content area)
- Form: Morphology (word parts) = ______________________________ (a commonly incorrect prefix, suffix, or root word part from your content area)
Syntax: Revisited
To continue our metaphor from above, syntax would be like the mortar of a construction project. It is the cement, or glue, that holds the bricks in place so that the structure can begun to be built. We can think of the mortar much like the grammar that holds our language together so that we can communicate our thoughts and ideas.
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This exercise does illustrate how providing a support such as a sentence frame can extend syntax, but more importantly first illustrates that the instructor needs to reflectively think through and describe the academic language that is necessary to meet demands of the lesson objective.
Discourse: Revisited
Extending our architectural metaphor yet again, discourse would be like the building that is created. Just as there as many distinct types of buildings, there are many distinct types of discourses. Imagine that your subject-specific content is filled with buildings of various shapes and sizes that relate to the prevalence of specific discourses used most often in your field of study to interact, learn, and complete projects or tasks.
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