4.5 A Pedagogical Heuristic for Working with Compl...
Academic texts of varying complexities present different processing demands for reading comprehension. Students need support to successfully navigate these texts. Such support can be provided through functional grammar analysis, first described in Chapter 3. Using the instructional framework presented in Table 3-1, students engage in intensive analysis and examination of a text through multiple readings in order to understand its main ideas and key details, its craft and structure, and its voice or style. A potentially powerful pedagogical heuristic that embeds functional grammar analysis is 5Es — Enquire, Engage, Examine, Exercise, and Extend (Fang, 2020). The heuristic, shown in Figure 4-1, puts Enquire in the center, making it the foundation upon which functional grammar analysis and the whole edifice of text exploration are built. Students enquire into an idea, issue, or problem that is of interest to them or significance to their discipline in a unit of study that focuses on such topics as climate change, genetic editing, the #me too movement, human trafficking, concussion and sports, food safety, drug addiction, social realism, transcendentalism, White supremacism, Halloween, the Vietnam War, the Sino-U.S. trade war, the Jim Crow era, the Boston Massacre, electoral college, affirmative action and college admission, immigration and globalization, education of migrant children, same sex marriage, Brexit, domestic/international terrorism, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Chinese soccer and world cup, and gun control. The enquiry, which is a thread running through the entire unit, can involve reading, writing, viewing, talking, experimenting, observing, interviewing, performing, field trips, and so on.
Figure 4-1 5Es Pedagogical Heuristic for Working with Complex Texts
During the Engage phase, students read many texts that will help them develop a general understanding of the key concepts and core ideas related to the topic or issue under investigation. The reading can be done both in class and after class. While reading, students jot down thoughts, connections, and questions. They then share these notes with peers in small groups or the whole class. The discussion enhances students' content understanding, motivates them to pursue deeper learning, and prepares them for subsequent close reading.(https://www.daowen.com)
During the Examine phase, which involves functional grammar analysis, the teacher identifies important but potentially challenging segments in the texts students have been reading and engages them in rereading and deconstructing these segments, drawing on the metalanguage provided by SFL. For example, they can explore what the text is about through transitivity analysis, using constructs such as participant, process, attribute, and circumstance. They can explore how the text is organized through analysis of Thematic progression, cohesion patterns, and clause combining strategies, using constructs such as Theme, Rheme, reference, clause complexing, projection, and expansion. They can explore the author's points of view through Mood and appraisal analysis, using constructs such as Mood, modality, attitude, graduation, and engagement. The analyses and discussions will develop students' awareness and understanding of how grammar is used to make discipline/genre-specific and register-appropriate meanings.
During the Exercise phase, the teacher designs tasks that highlight or reinforce key grammatical patterns identified in the texts (or text segments) students have read closely. These tasks can focus on key, unfamiliar, or challenging ways language is deployed to make meaning in academic/disciplinary texts. Sample language features to be spotlighted can include the use of technical terminology to construe specialized knowledge and build technical taxonomy; the use of passive voice to bury agency or facilitate discursive flow; the use of non-finite clause or preposition to construe causation; the use of expanded noun phrase with premodifiers and qualifiers (i.e., postmodifiers) to pack dense information and infuse judgment; the use of nominalization to distill information, bury agency, embed ideology, coin technical terms, and create discursive flow; the use of thematic prominence to foreground certain concepts or ideas; the use of appositive to rename, define, explain, or clarify another noun within a sentence; the use of the zigzagging Thematic progression to create tightly knit texts with semantic flow; and the use of hedges to show caution about knowledge claims and deference to authority. These exercises give students the opportunity to "play" with the specific language features used in the texts they have read, further cementing their understanding of the meaning, structure, function, and logic of these features and developing their facility in using academic/disciplinary language for authentic purposes and meaningful contexts.
In the final phase, Extend, the teacher encourages students to use the new or unfamiliar language features identified in the Exercise phase as they compose a new text that synthesizes and critiques the information they have learned, approximates the genre they hope to emulate in their unit study, or responds to an idea or issue presented in the text (s) they have read. Students can be guided through the composing process of generating ideas, creating drafts, making revisions, and publishing their work. Taken together, the 5Es heuristic provides teachers with a coherent instructional framework for engaging students in meaningful, holistic learning that promotes language learning and literacy development at the same time they are exploring issues or questions they find relevant or compelling.