The Language of Schooling

A Functional Linguistics Perspective

Mary J. Schleppegrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135620912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is about how language is used in the context of schooling. It demonstrates that the variety of English expected at school differs from the interactional language that students use for social purposes outside of school, and provides a linguistic analysis of the challenges of the school curriculum, particularly for non-native speakers of English, speakers of non-standard dialects, and students who have little exposure to academic language outside of schools. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective builds on current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic studies of language in school, but adds a new dimension--the framework of functional linguistic analysis. This framework focuses not just on the structure of words and sentences, but on how texts are constructed--how particular grammatical choices create meanings in the different kinds of texts students are asked to read and write at school. The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective *provides a functional description of the kinds of texts students are expected to read and write at school;*relates research from other sociolinguistic and language development perspectives to research from the systemic functional linguistics perspective;*focuses on the increasing linguistic demands of contexts of advanced literacy (middle school through college);*analyzes the genres typically encountered at school, with extensive description of the grammatical features of the expository essay, a gatekeeping genre for secondary school graduates;*reviews the grammatical features of disciplinary genres in science and history; and*argues for more explicit attention to language in teaching all subjects, with a particular focus on what is needed for the development of critical literacy.This book will enable researchers and students of language in education to recognize how the grammatical and discourse features of the language of schooling construct the content areas, role relationships, and purposes and expectations of schools. It also will enable them to better understand the nature of language itself and how it emerges from and helps to maintain social structures and institutions, and to apply these understandings to creating classroom environments that build on the strengths students bring to school.

1
Characterizing the Language of Schooling

[L]anguage is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience
becomes knowledge.

—Halliday (1993g, p. 94)

How do we come to know something? In particular, how do we come to the abstract kinds of knowledge that schooling aims to develop? As the opening quote from M. A. K. Halliday suggests, this book takes a linguistic perspective on this question. It offers a way of seeing how meaning and form are related in the different options available in the grammatical systems of the English language, and how knowledge is construed in the language of schooling. Grammatical choices realize meanings of different kinds. This book explores the meanings typical of the texts students are asked to read and write at school. It identifies linguistic features common to school-based tasks and demonstrates how those features enable the construal of increasingly specialized knowledge as students progress through school. Learning therefore involves linguistic challenges that increase as students move from primary to secondary schooling and on to higher education.

Developing the kind of knowledge that comes through schooling requires that students learn to use language in new ways. Even brief observation of any classroom shows the role that language plays in both managing activity and presenting academic content. It is through language that school subjects are taught and through language that students’ understanding of concepts is displayed and evaluated in school contexts. In addition, knowledge about language itself is part of the content of schooling, as children are asked to adopt the word-, sentence-, and rhetorical-level conventions of writing, to define words, and in other ways to focus on language as language. In other words, the content, as well as the medium, of schooling is, to a large extent, language. Schooling is primarily a linguistic process, and language serves as an often unconscious means of evaluating and differentiating students.

Inasmuch as content and disciplinary knowledge are constituted and presented through language, learning an academic subject means reading and writing texts that are organized linguistically to accomplish particular communicative purposes. In school, students are expected to use language to demonstrate what they have learned and what they think in ways that can be shared, evaluated, and further challenged or supported. The texts they read and write present knowledge in ways that are different from the interactional co-construction of meaning in more informal situations. So the patterns of language chosen by students to express and share their understanding are of major importance in presenting themselves as knowers and sharers of knowledge. But language patterns themselves are rarely the focus of attention of students and teachers. Their attention is typically on the content of the texts they read and respond to but not on the ways language construes that content. In addition, teachers’ expectations for language use are seldom made explicit, and much of what is expected regarding language use in school tasks remains couched in teachers’ vague admonitions to “use your own words” or to “be clear.” Writing tasks are assigned without clear guidelines for students about how a particular text type is typically structured and organized. For these reasons Christie (1985) has called language the “hidden curriculum” of schooling.

By exploring the features of this “hidden curriculum,” we can reveal the patterns of language use that present challenges to students. Students’ difficulties in “reasoning,” for example, may be due to their lack of familiarity with the linguistic properties of the language through which the reasoning is expected to be presented, rather than to the inherent difficulty of the cognitive processes involved (Clark, 1977; Christie, 1999b). When students use linguistic styles typical of ordinary conversational interaction to present information or make an argument in schooling contexts, they may be judged illogical or disorganized in their thinking. Students who do not use language in the ways expected at school may even be thought to have learning difficulties, especially if their spoken English is fluent, as is often the case with speakers of nonstandard dialects or immigrant students who have been in the United States for many years. Judgments about students’ abilities are often based on how they express their knowledge in language. The testing, counseling, and classroom interactions that inform these judgments perpetuate and maintain values that are often not made explicit. This suggests that a careful analysis of the linguistic challenges of learning is important for understanding the difficulties students face and the limitations they demonstrate in talking and writing about topics they have studied.

By investigating how the knowledge and social practices that constitute schooling are construed in great part through language, we gain insights into the ways that different linguistic choices are functional for creating different types of texts. This helps us better understand the power of language in the development of what students learn. “Learning language” and “learning through language” are simultaneous (Halliday, 1993g). By recognizing the ways that language construes different kinds of meanings, we see how the sociocultural knowledge needed for success at school includes learning the ways of using language that enable students to develop and display new knowledge. With a functional linguistic perspective, we have a means of focusing on the forms through which knowledge is construed. This can inform pedagogical practice and enable teachers to make explicit the ways that meanings are made through language. Teachers need greater knowledge about the linguistic basis of what they are teaching and tools for helping students achieve greater facility with the ways language is used in creating the kinds of texts that construe specialized knowledge at school.

THE LINGUISTIC CONTEXT OF SCHOOLING

For many children, schooling presents a new situation, new ways of interacting, and new types of texts, as they are expected to read and write genres that construe new kinds of disciplinary knowledge. As they write, the lexical and grammatical choices they make, clause by clause, simultaneously construe social relationships and experience of the world. This book presents a functional linguistic analysis that demonstrates how each clause presents experience and enacts a social relationship, at the same time that it links with a previous clause and builds up information that is then carried forward in subsequent clauses. Although these three processes always occur together in any use of language, the way they occur differs according to the context.

Many teachers are unprepared to make the linguistic expectations of schooling explicit to students. Schools need to be able to raise students’ consciousness about the power of different linguistic choices in construing different kinds of meanings and realizing different social contexts. In order for this to happen, researchers and teacher educators need a more complete understanding of the linguistic challenges of schooling. In the absence of an explicit focus on language, students from certain social class backgrounds continue to be privileged and others to be disadvantaged in learning, assessment, and promotion, perpetuating the obvious inequalities that exist today.

The school plays a major role in shaping students’ lives and preparing them to play particular roles in society. Schools value those ways of using language that are characteristic of the professional, technical, and bureaucratic institutions of our society, and in valuing those resources and forms, also typically de-value other forms and resources. Assessment of students’ intelligence and scholastic achievement is accomplished in the interactions between teachers and students, and testers and students (Mehan, 1978), and such interactions often rely on judgments about students’ linguistic skills. The linguistic basis of these judgments, however, is seldom made explicit. By analyzing the kinds of grammatical choices that help students successfully accomplish assigned tasks, we can reveal the overt and covert expectations that guide the assessment and evaluation of students’ school performance and identify the choices that are highly valued in academic language tasks.

Language use is always socially and culturally situated. What we learn and how we learn it depends on the contexts in which we learn. Not all students come to school with the same background and ways of using language. School language tasks are not familiar to all students from their experiences in their homes and communities. For some children, the socialization contexts in which they have participated have prepared them well for the ways of using language they encounter at school. For many other children, however, this is not the case. That is why the concerns addressed in this book are important. By focusing on language as a means of understanding content, pedagogical practice can respect the language students bring to the classroom at the same time they are offered tools for developing new linguistic resources.

As students move from the early primary years into late primary school, middle school, and high school, and then into college or university, they need to engage in increasingly advanced literacy tasks in which language is typically structured in ways which condense information through lexical choices and clause structures that are different from the way language is typically used in ordinary contexts of everyday interaction. This book demonstrates how the contexts of schooling are construed through particular kinds of grammatical and lexical choices that make the kinds of meanings that are expected at school. It identifies the features that school language draws on and shows why those features are functional for learning and displaying knowledge. It suggests that the features be brought to the attention of students in ways that help them understand the functionality of particular linguistic choices for creating the texts they read and write at school.

Of course, problems of student learning have multiple causes that go far beyond linguistic issues. But analysis of the language used to teach and learn school subjects can illuminate some of the difficulties students experience in achieving school success. Exploring the features of language used in schooling highlights the relationship between language and learning in ways that reveal the close connection between language and content in all school subjects. Knowing how knowledge is construed in language can make the relationship between language and learning a focus of attention in schools and help teachers change the success patterns of students who currently do not succeed. At the same time, making explicit the way the curriculum is construed in language can also open up the curriculum to challenge or change by those who recognize its limitations or constraints.

This book provides a linguistic description of the language of schooling, focusing in particular on the challenges of advanced literacy: reading and writing the kinds of texts relevant to middle school, secondary school, and higher education contexts. The illustrative examples used throughout the book come from a variety of studies and draw on interviews with students, textbook passages from different subject areas and grade levels, and texts written by middle school, high school, and university students, including both native and nonnative speakers of English. The context of production for all of this language is the school and classroom, where finding examples to support the linguistic arguments being made here is relatively straightforward. The language expected and required in school settings has similar grammatical features, so exemplars of such language are ubiquitous in the school context. Describing the language that realizes “schooling” broadly enough to capture its essential qualities requires abstraction from actual language data in the same sense that we have to abstract from actual language data to describe “English” or “Chinese.” Although any particular example may not demonstrate every feature of the school-based registers being described here, each example, as a particular instance that construes the context of schooling, has a constellation of features that situates it as an instantiation of the system as a whole.

“School” is also presented here as a unitary construct, in spite of the fact that each classroom and each school has its own subculture and its own ways of using language for learning. But school can also be conceptualized broadly as the institutional framework in which children are socialized into ways of formal learning in our society, and it is this understanding of school that informs the discussion here. In the context of schooling in systems that have evolved from western European traditions, students are expected to present their developing knowledge in particular ways through language. It is those expectations that are the subject of this book.

THE CHALLENGES OF “LITERATE” LANGUAGE

In today’s complex world, literacy means far more than learning to read and write in order to accomplish particular discrete tasks. Instead, literacy is a form of social action where language and context co-participate in making meaning (Halliday, 1978; Lemke, 1989). Although much research has focused on the features of early reading and writing in school contexts, less work has been done related to the kinds of tasks that challenge students in middle school, high school, and postsecondary education. These advanced literacy contexts (Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002) call for a kind of meaning-making that is also required for participation in many of the institutions of today’s world. An individual’s growth and development and ability to participate in society require ever-expanding knowledge and control over meaning-making in new contexts and through new linguistic resources. Students need to use language in particular ways in order to be successful in science, history, and other subjects; to develop interpretations, construct arguments, and critique theories.

Learning to use language in ways that meet the school’s expectations for advanced literacy tasks is a challenge for all students, but it is especially difficult for those who have little opportunity for exposure to and use of such language outside of school. Our schools serve students who speak different languages and dialects, who have been socialized in different ways, and who face different kinds of challenges in their daily lives. Students whose cultural practices are similar to those of the school may be able to transfer those practices to the school setting, but students from other backgrounds may need to focus on the ways that language contributes to meaning-making as they engage in new social and cultural practices in order to succeed in achieving advanced literacy.

The functional linguistics approach that this book takes focuses on the ways that social contexts are always realized in the linguistic choices speakers and writers make in constructing texts of different types. It is the social contexts that need to remain at the forefront of our thinking about the linguistic challenges of schooling so that our approach to research and pedagogy can reveal the true expectations that the tasks of advanced schooling present to the diverse students in today’s schools.

Much research on students’ language development and much analysis of school-based language focus on the differences between speech and writing, describing the challenges that come with the need to deal in a written mode at school. From this perspective, “literate” texts have been described as decontextualized, explicit, and complex (Gumperz, Kaltman, & O’Connor, 1984; Michaels & Cazden, 1986; Michaels & Collins, 1984; Olson, 1977, 1980; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Snow, 1983; Torrance & Olson, 1984). These features, in this view, make this language more cognitively demanding than the language of spoken interaction.

Decontextualization, explicitness, and complexity are inadequate characterizations of the real challenges of the language through which schooling is realized, however. Such characterizations of “literate” language are motivated by the linguistic features of this language, but these terms carry values that can distract us from attending to the social contexts of language use and the ways those contexts are realized in particular grammatical and lexical choices.

School-based texts accomplish particular purposes in schooling by construing the kinds of experience and interpersonal relationships that are expected in the schooling context, which itself has particular cultural purposes. By recognizing how different linguistic choices are functional for construing experience, presenting one’s perspective, and constructing particular kinds of texts, we keep the focus on the role of language as a social force. This perspective expands the teaching arena, enabling the teacher to be proactive in new ways in helping students learn the ways language is used to construe knowledge in different subject areas. Because all language use contributes to the construal of the social contexts in which it occurs, a functional theory of language enables us to identify the linguistic choices that realize particular kinds of contexts. The notion of linguistic “choice” is a key feature of the analysis presented here. Rather than seeing language as a set of rules, the functional linguistic perspective sees the language system as...