What are the top three reasons your students would benefit from what Schleppegrell and O'Halloran write about and why?
As you know, the student population that I currently serve is quite different from those described in this article. Although I may have one or two L2 students each school year, typically these students have already received English language instruction before moving to the United States and are functioning at a proficient level in both their language arts and content area courses. That being said, I find that academic language can still present a challenge for those students along with my non-ELL students; this is where systemic functional linguistics (SFL) may be of use in my teaching.
One way in which my students would benefit from lessons that are based on SFL is that I will be better prepared to analyze and respond to their academic writing on literature. When my students have difficulty evaluating a character, for example, I tend to address those difficulties as a grammar issue, rather than a lack of academic language issue. Learning how to address this issue from an SFL standpoint may give me the tools that I need to provide feedback on how to use academic language in their analysis of literature, rather than using the informal language they are accustomed to using in their everyday lives.
In addition to learning how to provide my students written feedback regarding academic language, I realize that I should probably be explicitly teaching academic language as well. The article mentioned a case study reported by Spycher (2007) where academic language was explicitly taught to 11th-grade students in order to "identify language features that students were attempting to use in their expository writing, but found challenging." Included in these language features was the modeling, explanation, and practice of how to deconstruct text. I found this especially interesting because although deconstructing poetry and prose to discover the author's purpose and/or meaning is quite commonplace, I have never considered the value in having my students deconstruct a text to evaluate academic language. I can clearly see how this practice would help my students learn how to recognize academic language and then use it in their own writing.
Another area in which my students need to sharpen their use of academic language is in their oral presentations. The article suggested focusing on spoken academic language by providing tasks where students could first use their informal language to cull information and then develop an oral presentation using academic language. This idea seems like an ideal culminating assessment for a unit that has emphasized academic language. I would first have students deconstruct texts to recognize and evaluate academic language in writing. A follow-up lesson would be writing an analysis of a piece of literature using some of the academic language evaluated in the previous lesson. Lastly, an oral presentation on the subject matter would provide students with the opportunity to not only use academic language in writing, but also in speaking. Of course, these three lessons present a very basic framework in macro-scaffolding, but with some more education on SFL and attention to micro-scaffolding, I believe I can improve my students' use of academic language in both their writing and speaking.
As you said deconstructing the text for its language features is really the key to growth. By deconstructing academic texts students begin to demystify some of the more challenging texts and see it as a composite of features which they can begin to recognize and eventually to model.
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