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.
When you think of ‘function’, think about the verb as often the function is expressed as a verb such as critique, examine, retell argue, and categorize. Other examples of function include the following, along with their associated or related functions (Benegas & Stopelstad, 2020); Academic language function words in bold are used by the EdTPA teacher assessment system (www.edtpa.com):
- Locate-- define, seek information, count, identify, indicate, match, name, point, recall, recite, repeat, reproduce, state, select, recall.
- Order—Categorize, organize, develop, discover, complete, process, outline, retell, order
- Describe— inform, explain, identify, report, retell, recount, reorder, represent, depict, paraphrase, summarize, conclude, prepare, convert, translate, generalize, extrapolate, narrate.
- Classify— arrange, organize, categorize, construct, create, generate, summarize, arrange, group
- Compare/Contrast— Describe (similarities and differences), distinguish, identify, recognize, separate, differentiate.
- Analyze— calculate, interpret, classify, categorize, predict, deduce, differentiate, examine, discriminate, distinguish, group, illustrate, infer, order, recognize, relate, transform
- Synthesize— Arrange, categorize, combine, compile, compose, construct, create, deduce, explain, formulate, generalize, generate, integrate, modify, organize, prepare, plan, produce, propose, rearrange, reconstruct, relate, reorganize, revise, solve, summarize.
- Justify— argue, persuade, discriminate, prove, deduce, document, support, question, validate, verify, debate, construct, persuade
- Infer-- predict, hypothesize, extrapolate, restate, summarize, reconstruct, synthesize, derive, deduce, explain, create, construct
- Evaluate- argue, appraise, assess, compare, conclude, consider, contrast, criticize, critique, decide, describe, determine, discriminate, grade, judge, justify, recommend, validate, verify, test, support, rate, rank, measure, interpret, relate, identify, explain, indicate, confirm.
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).
Working alone or with a partner, take a moment to reflect on an example for each that would connect to your instructional goals. You can use this equation as a frame to help you focus on the reasons why these particular forms are terms that some students need explicitly taught in order to be successful in your content area:
- 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.
For practice, think of a phrase or sentence that you would like your students to be able to understand or produce that relates to your lesson objective or content area and share it here:
- _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Now, complete the following objective using the provided sentence frame to demonstrate your skills and celebrate your syntax!
- I can identify the syntax related to my content area using ______________________________________________ (name a language structure used above), such as ___________________________________________________________ (your example of this structure) with the support of this sentence frame and lesson plan handbook guided notes.
Note that in the above example objective frame, the underlined form "identify" communicates the academic language function and the phrase "this sentence frame and guided notes" communicates the supports or tools provided to assist in developing language use and understanding. An example of completing the above syntax might be: "I can identify the syntax related to my content area using grammatical terminology, such as 'phrases' with the support of this sentence frame and lesson plan handbook guided notes."
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.
Rather than list all the possible types that exist, it is potentially more helpful to identify discourse that is most often used within your content area major. Label the "buildings" below with 4 types of discourse that are used most often to communicate in your subject-specific area, related to the language domains (SWRL). The first one is done for you, but feel free to think of your own example as well.
Speaking Discourse: Writing Discourse: Reading Discourse: Listening Discourse:
Example: _informal partner discussion__ _________________________ _________________________ ___________________________