English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Engaging teachers in language analysis: A functional linguistics approach to reflective literacy
Volume 6 Number 2 September 2007
Mariana Achugar (Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University)
Mary Schleppegrell (School of Education, University of Michigan)
Teresa Oteiza (Facultad de Humanidades y Arte, Universidad de ConcepciĆ³n)
Classrooms around the world are becoming more multilingual and
teachers in all subject areas are faced with new challenges in enabling
learners' academic language development without losing focus on
content. These challenges require new ways of conceptualizing the
relationship between language and content as well as new pedagogies
that incorporate a dual focus on language and content in subject matter
instruction. This article describes three professional development
contexts in the U.S., where teachers have engaged in language analysis
based on functional linguistics (for example, Halliday & Hasan,
1989; Christie, 1989) that has given them new insights into both
content and learning processes. In these contexts, teachers in history
classrooms with English Language Learners and teachers of languages
other than English in classrooms with heritage speakers needed support
to develop students' academic language development in a second
language. The functional linguistics metalanguage and analysis skills
they developed gave them new ways of approaching the texts read and
written in their classrooms and enabled them to recognize how language
constructs the content they are teaching, to critically assess how the
content is presented in their teaching materials, and to engage
students in richer conversation about content.