I'll allow myself a bit of a tangent that informs my growing theoretical perspective on academic language...The more theories and research that I read on teaching academic English, I find myself coming back to the question of limitations of this work. I understand the imperative to explicitly teach academic English. Having it opens doors, while the lack can mean the door is shut quickly in one's face. Consider this quote:
But I am troubled by equating academic language with success in this way for a number of reasons. First, people don't just have academic English or not. Despite the logic of standardized literacy tests, there is no authentic cut-off score that marks students as either having or not having the requisite skills for successful participation in and out of school. Additionally, being academically proficient in the dominant language does not assure access to the privileges of the dominant culture. It may be tempting to assume that teaching students how to be more "academic" is ultimately empowering (and many recent publications on the topic do so, e.g. Bailey, 2007; Zwiers, 2008), and while I agree with this notion to a degree, the logic starts to break down when people confront the harsh reality of systems that do not welcome them. Or perhaps the "welcome" signs are hanging behind many social and economic barriers to participation. For instance, you can work to learn how to write college-level essays all day long but if you can't actually afford to go to college and support yourself (and your family), then how empowering is it really?The 'everyday' speech we use is very different from the terminology used in schools. The ability to use the specialized language of the academic sphere is like a gatekeeper: it opens doors for those who have it, and fastens them shut for those who do not. -The Stanford Teacher Education Program
For undocumented students the picture gets even cloudier. They have virtually no options for financial aide. If they can pay the international student tuition, which is usually astronomical, they're nervous about enrolling and getting turned in to the feds... Under these circumstances, wielding academic English is still critical but it is insufficient. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can help us deconstruct the linguistic structure of a text, but it's not going to confront the systemic failure of a society to support all of its residents, whether citizens or not. What academic language teaching can do, however, is prepare students to read, write, and speak in ways that hold social power. Like it or not, public schools find themselves at the center of a political storm driven by deep fear and resentment that many American citizens feel towards immigrants. We hear it in the inflammatory rhetoric of popular pundits like Lou Dobbs. We see it in the flurry of ICE raids in New Bedford.
Given sweeping anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, public schools cannot rely on old, assimilation strategies. Mastering the English language and adhering to a strong "work ethic" are products of the myth of American meritocracy, but the truth value of meritocracy has increasingly tenuous. Learning the language and working hard and following the law do not guarantee access to the American dream. Today’s immigrants, who are overwhelming people of color, receive more pronounced and protracted scorn than European immigrants did. It is exceedlingly difficult to blend into a melting pot when skin color is used to mark people as outsiders. Skulking behind immigration debates lie fears of demographic shifts that have already substantively altered the composition of many US communities and will favor non-whites in the coming decades, fears that are tacitly framed by matters of race and racism.
SFL will not provide answers to navigate these questions, but by studying it, I hope to find a tool that might aid in the struggle for a more inclusive and just society. Teaching academic language is part of the picture but so is social organizing and contentious politics and coalition building and...
Just some things swirling in my brain today...
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Hi Alex
In your critique of SFL, or any other way of naming and unpacking registers of power, how does that critique connect, more explicitly, to the underlying promise of education, that is that academic achievement is supposed to connect to other forms of cultural capital. At heart in this breakdown, I think, is the disconnect that education, and most other fields, happily enjoy from other fields, like immigration law, the need for cheap labor in an information society, etc. It's only through a myopic disconnect from how social institutions work that anyone can truly believe that fluency in the language of power will, alone, provide access to societal capital. Dismantling inequity is a completely different starting stance than access to power. And, in my mind lately is who Freire said can actually do that work, and it definitely was not the oppressor.
leigh.
...freire did certainly recognize both internal and external structures that create and sustain... and that the oppressor cannot exist without the oppressed. I know that realization of this context does not constitute liberation but trust it is a place to join the struggle--both for those who are oppressed and for privileged guys like myself.
Reminds me of the quote, "I don't want a citizen, I want a worker..."
Cool conversation -
I've been drafting some thoughts/writing on the following topic:
What makes the emphasis of critical academic language different than the back to basics campaign of the early 1980's. Are they the same? Are they different?
What's different? What's the same? I guess it depends. I saw the Back to Basics movement as functioning to quarantine kids--to identify the "less capable" students for remediation and exclude them from more academically rigorous curriculum and instruction until their literacy disease could be diagnosed and cured... This problematic act of labeling students as deficits remains, cultural baggage that's hard to discard. But I hope what's different is that SFL and teaching academic language attempts to scaffold learners into sophisticated texts, to provide supports so that more students can access rigorous material...that the approach seeks greater inclusion rather than siphoning and excluding...But I am assuming a lot here and like so much in teaching, it depends.
What do you say?
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