5.3 Teaching Close Reading Through Functional Gram...
One way to implement functional grammar analysis in teaching close reading with complex academic texts is through the 5Es heuristic introduced in Chapter 4 — Enquire, Engage, Examine, Exercise, and Extend. In this model, Enquiry is the thread that runs through the entire instructional cycle. It is the foundation upon which close reading is built, as close reading cannot take place in a vacuum. Specifically, students engage in first-hand exploration of an idea, issue, or problem that is significant to the discipline or of interest to them. The exploration is typically done through unit studies and can involve, for example, experiments, observations, field trips, interviews with experts, reading, writing, talking, performing, and so on. During the Engage phase, students read many texts that are important to the topic under investigation and that will help develop their understanding of the key concepts and core ideas related to the topic. During the Examine phase, the teacher identifies important but potentially challenging segments of a text and engages students in reading these segments closely. During the Exercise phase, the teacher designs tasks that highlight or reinforce key or new language patterns identified in the texts students have been reading closely. Finally, in the Extend phase, the teacher guides students in developing a new text that synthesizes the information they have learned through disciplinary experiences or approximates the genre they hope to emulate in their study. Students can also write a personal response to or a formal critique of the text (s) they have been reading in the unit.
5.3.1 Enquire
To exemplify how functional grammar analysis is used within the 5Es framework, the rest of the chapter describes a unit of instruction in which students are enquiring into the causes and effects of the Boston Massacre as part of a history unit on the American Revolution. Through the exploration, students are expected to identify key events, facts, and historical figures related to the Boston Massacre; detect contradicting views of the historical event using primary sources; evaluate the trustworthiness of historical documents; understand what counts as legitimate evidence and argument; develop a sophisticated understanding of historical time, agency, and causality related to the Boston Massacre and the American Revolution; and recognize the author's interpretive perspectives. To accomplish these goals, students read and discuss a plethora of texts (including paintings) on the Boston Massacre, watch related videos, interview experts, and visit historical sites and museums in Boston (or virtually).
5.3.2 Engage
Recognizing that history is a discipline built on evidence-based interpretations and arguments involving texts of primary, secondary and even tertiary sources such as original documents, maps, political cartoons, trade books, textbooks, paintings, photographs, newspapers, videos, and online links (Nokes, 2013), the teacher has students spend the bulk of their time in reading, viewing, examining, and discussing many textual and visual resources. As students interact with these resources (see Figure 5-1 for sample resources), they engage in the heuristics, or habits of mind, that historians employ in their social practices. These include sourcing, corroborating, contextualizing, inferring, and perspective taking (Nokes, 2013; Wineburg, Martin & MonteSano, 2013; VanSledright, 2012). In sourcing, students consider the author's sociocultural and educational background, his/her physical location during an event, and his/her purpose for creating the text. In corroborating, students compare different accounts of the same event to determine the validity and reliability of each source. They take note of points of agreement/disagreement across sources and what the author chose to include/exclude in each source. They seek explanations for discrepancies across sources and assess the credibility of each source. In contextualizing, students comprehend and evaluate text against the physical, social, and temporal contexts of a document's creation, taking into consideration such factors as the geography surrounding an event, the time and day the event occurred, the cultural and social setting of the event, the biographical profiles of the participants in the event, and even the changing meaning of words across time. In inferring, students make inferences based on their own background knowledge about the topic/issue and the evidence (e.g., artifacts) they have gathered during the enquiry process. In perspective taking, students develop historical empathy by trying to understand the physical, social, and interpersonal context that gave rise to an individual's actions, words, and worldviews. This is a cognitive and logical process that results in a better understanding of historical actions.
Textual Resources
· The Boston Massacre (https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/boston-massacre)
· The Boston Massacre (https://hsi.wm.edu/cases/boston/boston_documents.html#doc2)
· The Boston Massacre (https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ushistory/road-to-revolution/the-american-revolution/a/the-bostonmassacre)
· Boston Massacre Trial (https://www.nps.gov/bost/learn/historyculture/massacre-trial.htm)
· The Boston Massacre, 1770: The British Perspective (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/bostonmassacre.htm)
· Boston Massacre - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre)
· Anonymous Account of the Boston Massacre (http://www.ushistory.org/us/9e.asp)
· Abrams, D. & Fisher, D. (2020). John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father's Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial. New York: Hanover Square Press.
· Doggett, J. (2014). A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston. Berwyn Heights, MD: Heritage Books.
· Kennedy, D., Cohen, L. & Bailey, T. (2010). The American Pageant: A History of the American People, Vol. I: To 1877 (14th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Videos
· https://www.history.com/shows/america-the-story-of-us/videos/boston-massacre
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K2UgQFRr38
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O05rNWygHF4
Paintings
· Paul Revere engraving
· Paul Revere sketch of the massacre scene(https://www.daowen.com)
· Henry Pelham engraving
· William Nell illustration, c. 1855· Howard Pyle illustration, c. 1883
· William Champney drawing, c. 1856
· Engraving based on Alonzo Chappel painting (1868)
Figure 5-1 Textual and Visual Resources Related to the Boston Massacre
5.3.3 Examine
In their interactions with the textual resources, students are likely to encounter texts with unfamiliar language patterns that present challenges to comprehension, interpretation, and critique. A sample of this sort of text can be found in Text 5-2, presented earlier in this chapter. The teacher zeros in on the excerpt, helping students unpack the passage, clause by clause and sentence by sentence. Using the instructional framework presented in Table 3-1 as a guide, the teacher first helps students explore what the text is about by engaging them in transitivity analysis. Together, they construct a visual like Table 5-1, which identifies the processes used in the text and associated participants, attributes, and circumstances. Identifying the process (realized in verbs) in each clause helps students think about what is going on in the text; that is, what historical events are presented and what background information is provided. Identifying the participants (realized in nouns) helps students think about who or what is involved in each process. Identifying the circumstance (realized in adverbs and prepositional phrases) helps students think about when, where, and how events happened. Identifying the attribute helps students think about how events and participants are characterized.
Through the analysis, students discover that two processes are dominant in the passage — the material (doing/happening) and the relational (being/having). The material processes describe the actions of British officials (faced with, landed), British soldiers (shot, acting, opened fire, killed or wounded), and colonists/Bostonians (taunted, began taunting and throwing, provoked). For the other four actions (blame, found, released, branded), the agents are not explicitly stated because they may be unknown to the author or unimportant to the text, and thus have to be inferred. The relational processes allow the author to infuse his/her explanations and interpretations of these events. They characterize British soldiers as drunken and profane, but nervous; Bostonians as angry; and the clash between the colonists and the soldiers as inevitable. They also identify the killing as the Boston Massacre, one of the first victims of the massacre as Crispus Attucks, Crispus Attucks as a powerfully built runaway "mulatto" and a leader of the mob, and the defense attorney for British soldiers as future (American) president John Adams. One minor process in the passage, mental (resenting), presents how colonists felt about the British soldiers. Additional information about these processes — such as time (in 1768; on the evening of March 5, 1770; ten days earlier; during a protest against a merchant), location (in Boston, in the subsequent trial, on the hand), manner (unmercifully, apparently without orders, in some degree), cause (over the death of an eleven-year-old boy, of manslaughter), and source (by contemporaries) — is provided in the circumstance element of each clause.
Table 5-1 Functional Grammar Analysis of a Sample Text
Constructing a visual like Table 5-1 is by no means a mechanical exercise of copying words and phrases into cells. As students partition each clause, they have to think about the meaning of each clause constituent in the context of the text, the logical links among clauses, and historical agency. For example, to truly comprehend the first three sentences (i.e., clauses #1-5), students need to be able to uncover the grammatical subject for each non-finite clause from the main clause (British officials for faced with a breakdown of law and order and liberty-loving colonists for resenting the presence of red-coated "ruffians"), track participants (e.g., bloody backs — redcoats — soldiers — troops; colonists — Bostonians — townspeople), detect the cause-effect relationship between the non-finite clause and the main clause (i.e., a breakdown of law and order led British officials to land two regiments of troops in Boston in 1768; colonists' resentment led to their taunting of British soldiers), sort out the chronological sequence of events (e.g., breakdown of law and order occurred before the British troops arrived; colonists resented British troops after they had arrived), recognize the conflation of time and cause (breakdown of law and order → British troops arrived → colonists resented British troops→ colonists taunted British troops → British troops opened fire → colonists were killed or wounded), and unpack densely abstract noun phrases (e.g., a breakdown of law and order, the presence of the red-coated "ruffians").
Students also need to recognize that cause-effect relationships are not always realized through the familiar resources of conjunctions, but are sometimes realized clause internally, that is, within a single clause, through the use of prepositions or non-finite clauses. In clause #4, for example, the non-finite clause — resenting the presence of the red-coated "ruffians" — can be understood as the cause of colonists' unmerciful taunting of British soldiers. In clause #9, the cause of anger is introduced with a preposition over (to be followed by a noun phrase), rather than a typical conjunction like "because" or "therefore" (to be followed by a clause); that is, the crowd was angry because an eleven-year-old boy was shot dead. Similarly, in clause #20, the preposition of signals that manslaughter is the cause of a guilty verdict against the soldiers. In the last two sentences (clauses #19-23), students need to turn passive voice into active voice, and in the process think about the actors who assigned the blame, found two of the redcoats guilty, branded the soldiers, and released the soldiers.
It is likely that disagreements will arise during transitivity analysis. For example, some students may classify taunted as a verbal process because it involves verbal shouting, whereas others may classify it as a material process because it involves gestural intimidation (e.g., raising fists) accompanied by verbal shouting. In another instance, some students may classify served as in clause #21 as a material process and as defense attorney for the soldiers as a circumstantial element (i.e., role), but other students may classify served as as a relational process and defense attorney for the soldiers as identifier (value). This sort of disagreements is fine. What is more important here is the meaning-focused discussion itself, not necessarily the final decision that is reached. The key is that students have to provide evidence or rationale to defend their position. Nor should students get bogged down in metalinguistic terminology here. Instead of using the more technical process terms such as "material", "relational", and "mental", students can substitute them with, for example, "doing", "being", and "feeling", respectively. In short, a focus on language does not distract from a focus on content. Rather, discussion about language and grammar from a functional standpoint is essentially a discussion about meaning, or content, of the text. It is time well spent because it sensitizes students to language and at the same time develops their insights into the varied ways meanings are made through language in a text.
With an understanding of the "content" of the text, students are now ready to discuss how the text is organized. They note that the passage chronicles what happened before, during, and after the Boston Massacre. This is not a simple retelling of past events, however. The excerpt reads more like a "historical account" than "historical recount" (Coffin, 2006) in that the author embeds explanations and interpretations within the recounting of a sequence of past events. The first three sentences (clauses #1-5) provide the background events that led up to the Boston Massacre. The fourth sentence (clause #6) presents the author's interpretation of the situation (A clash was inevitable.). The rest of the passage recounts the sequence of events resulting in (clauses #7-18) and following (clauses #20-23) the massacre. Embedded in this recounting is the author's judgment of which side was to blame for the clash (clause #19) and interpretations of the often implicit causal relationships among events.
Because history is not the past but a narrative of the past, how the stories are told depends on the narrator's perspectives and biases (Coffin, 2006; Martin, 2002). This means it is important to explore the author's point of view in the text. This can be done by attending to word choices. Through reading and discussion, students note, for example, that what transpired in this particular period of U.S. history was referred to as the "Boston Massacre", a term that seems to foreground the brutality of the violence that occurred. Given the number of people who were killed at the scene and in light of other much more atrocious historical events that were described as a massacre, students wonder if less severe terms like "Boston Riot" or "Boston Incident" could have been used instead to characterize the clash. They are curious as to how the British side characterized the event. (In fact, the British called the event "the Incident on King Street".) They recognize that the term "Boston Massacre" carries the author's interpretive bias and was likely used to underscore the incident as a highly significant event that led to the American Revolution.
Students also comment that British soldiers were portrayed negatively as drunken and profane characters, ruffians, and bloody backs, whereas colonists were favorably labeled as liberty-loving. An examination of the processes (verbs) used in the text suggests that the author presented the colonists as the instigator (e.g., taunting, jeering, throwing) and the British soldiers as the main perpetrator of the Boston Massacre (e.g., opened fire, killed/wounded). However, the author also seemed to be sympathetic to the British soldiers, as they were described as nervous, provoked, taunted … unmercifully, and acting apparently without orders. The depiction of Crispus Attucks, one of the first victims killed, as powerfully built and leader of the mob further heightens the threat that British soldiers encountered. These descriptions led the author to conclude that Both sides were in some degree to blame. It is clear that the textbook author strived to present a balanced, unbiased account of the historical event. Finally, the inclusion of Crispus Attucks in the text and explicit reference to his ethnic identity (runaway "mulatto") perhaps signal the author's recognition of the seldom-talked-about fact that African Americans played a heroic role in the history of the United States.
The analysis and discussion described above focus on three key elements of text (i.e., content, organization, and perspective) that are typically the central preoccupations of every reading teacher. Although time consuming, this work is often necessary to help students tackle the linguistic challenges of academic texts and expand their linguistic repertoire. It enables students to not only learn about basic historical facts but more importantly, develop a deeper and more complex understanding of text. It is through intensive engagement with text that students begin to, for example, recognize that in historical texts, events may not always be presented chronologically, cause-effect relationships are often not made explicit, and causes and effects tend to be presented as abstractions that function as grammatical participants in a sequence of events and chains of reasoning. Ultimately, such an in-depth exploration of text helps students develop a more sophisticated understanding of how time, agency, and causation are construed in history and a deeper appreciation for how language is strategically deployed to present information, structure text, infuse judgment, develop argument, and design meaning.
5.3.4 Exercise
Having gained a deep understanding of the text, the teacher can now move into the next phase of the pedagogical heuristic — Exercise. In this phase, the teacher designs tasks that provide opportunities for students to enhance their understanding of, as well as facility in using, key or new language patterns. With respect to the history unit, for example, the teacher spotlights the non-finite clause, showing students how its deployment has both costs and benefits. On one hand, it makes the text appear more compact, focused, and tightly knit; on the other hand, it buries agency and logical connections that readers will have to uncover to ensure full comprehension. To help students better understand the logic, structure, function, and meaning of the non-finite clause, the teacher has students search for the linguistic device in the text (s) they have been reading, practice turning it into a complete sentence, explain what the transformation entails, and discuss how the transformation impacts the meaning and discursive flow of the text.
5.3.5 Extend
Finally, as a culminating activity of the unit, the teacher has students use primary and secondary sources to compose an essay that discusses the causes and effects of the Boston Massacre. In this assignment, students are encouraged to imitate the structure and language used in the texts they have been reading closely and spotlighted during the Exercise phase of the pedagogical heuristic. Alternatively, students can write an essay evaluating the credibility of different accounts of the Boston Massacre across several historical documents (e.g., texts and paintings), discussing the possible motivations of these accounts, and determining the author's point of view. To extend the unit further, students can do some research on other historical events that are similar to the Boston Massacre, such as the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, the Kent State shooting in Ohio in 1970, and the Los Angeles Riots in 1992, comparing and contrasting how these events were used as propaganda by interest groups at the time.
History education scholar Jeffrey Nokes (2013) defined historical literacy as the ability to construct meaning with historical texts, critically evaluate texts, use texts as evidence in developing original interpretations of past events, and create texts that meet discipline standards. Developing this ability requires a critical awareness and understanding of how historians use language (and other semiotic resources) to retell, analyze, and interpret significant past events. The close reading protocols described in this chapter have the potential to help students develop this critical language awareness and understanding, enabling them to recognize and weigh the facts and evidence presented in the text and evaluate "how the author has used them to suggest causes, inferences, linkages, and relationships" (Schleppegrell, 2011, p. 212).