Making Language Visible

By Dr. Ruslana Westerlund 

*I use this reading to introduce teachers and instructional leaders to a different way of seeing language. If you want to use this reading in your professional learning, I can share my processing activities. Please request permission by contacting me at westerlundconsulting.com

Earlier, I posted a quick Q&A on why I promote equity through SFL. Sara and Rafael (two international schools I work with) asked for more elaboration. So, here we go. I hope this is helpful and thank you for asking.

To make language visible is to make explicit something that is extraordinarily powerful in schooling yet often remains unseen: how language works to build knowledge, accomplish disciplinary purposes, and enable participation in learning.

Students use language throughout the school day. They analyze poetry and literature, ask questions about and explain scientific phenomena, justify their reasoning, retell stories, interpret historical events, construct arguments from evidence, participate in discussions, and write texts to demonstrate what they know. Yet the language through which students accomplish this work is often treated as though it were transparent. We teach the content. We assign the task. We ask students to explain, analyze, justify, or use evidence. But we do not always make visible what those expectations actually mean linguistically.

Frances Christie described language as the “hidden curriculum” of schooling (Christie, 1985b). That idea captures a central problem: language is embedded in virtually everything students are expected to accomplish in school, but many of its expectations remain implicit.

What makes an explanation of phenomenon a good one so that you can understand the how or why of historic or scientific phenomena? How does a scientist connect evidence to a claim? How does a historian distinguish evidence from interpretation? How does a mathematician use language to justify why a solution is valid? What makes one language choice more effective than another for a particular purpose?

When we do not make these expectations explicit, students are required to do two things at once: learn the disciplinary content and infer the unstated linguistic expectations for demonstrating that learning. They are, in a sense, being asked to “guess what’s in the teacher’s head.”

Making language visible begins by refusing to leave those expectations hidden.

Language Is for Making Meaning

Ruqayia Hasan provides an important foundation for understanding what making language visible should and should not mean. Hasan’s words, “language is for the living of life, not for the production of structures” (Hasan, 2011), kept me up at night because, for most of my formal schooling, all I did was learn structures. Her ideas taught me to rethink language not as an inventory of rules, but as a meaning making resource through which we interact, learn, develop knowledge, build relationships, and participate in the world.

That distinction has profound implications for teaching.

If we conceptualize language primarily as an inventory of structures, language instruction can easily become an inventory as well: vocabulary words to memorize, grammatical structures to practice, transition words to insert, and sentence frames to complete. Students can become collectors and producers of language structures without necessarily becoming more powerful meaning makers.

A functional perspective begins somewhere different. Instead of starting with the language structure we want students to produce, we start with meaning:

What is this student trying to mean? What are they trying to accomplish with language? What additional language resources would expand what they are able to do?

Grammar and vocabulary still matter enormously, but they matter because of the meanings they enable students to make. 

• Causal language helps a scientist explain relationships among phenomena. 
• Expanded noun groups allow writers to classify and describe with greater precision. 
• Modality allows students to present their claims not as ‘bare assertions’ or ‘absolutes’ but something that we could position as debatable. 
• Cohesive resources help students connect and track ideas across a text.
• Nominalization helps condense information and repackage whole clauses into a thing so more elaboration can be added.

The goal, then, is not to make linguistic structures visible simply so students can identify or reproduce them. It is to make visible how language works as a resource for thinking, learning, interacting, and making meaning.

The Language of Schooling Is an Equity Issue

Mary Schleppegrell’s The Language of Schooling (2004) is the most seminal piece which positions language of schooling as an equity issue. The language students encounter in school is not simply everyday language with more difficult vocabulary. Schooling asks students to participate in increasingly specialized ways of constructing and communicating knowledge.

As Schleppegrell points out:

“In the absence of explicit focus on language, children from certain … backgrounds continue to be privileged and others to be disadvantaged in learning, assessment, and promotion, perpetuating the obvious inequalities that exist today.”
— Mary Schleppegrell, The Language of Schooling (2004)

This is at the heart of Visible Language Pedagogy. When we leave the language expectations of schooling implicit, we are not creating a neutral learning environment. Students who have already had greater access to the genres and language practices valued by schools may be better positioned to infer what teachers expect. Other students may possess rich linguistic resources but have had less access to the specialized ways of making meaning that schools recognize, assess, and reward.

Making language visible changes that equation.

It means helping students see how scientists use language to explain causes and processes; how historians interpret evidence and construct arguments; how mathematicians describe patterns, generalize relationships, and justify reasoning; and how writers organize ideas differently depending on their purpose and audience.

It also means looking beyond vocabulary. Meaning is built through words and phrases, clauses and sentences, cohesive patterns across texts, and the overall organization of genres. Language cannot be separated from disciplinary learning and taught somewhere else because language is one of the primary resources through which disciplinary knowledge itself is constructed.

Learning a discipline includes learning how that discipline makes meaning.

From Hidden Curriculum to Visible Language

Making language visible therefore means bringing the linguistic dimensions of disciplinary learning into our instructional field of vision.

When we ask students to explain, we can make visible how language constructs causes, processes, consequences, and relationships. When students argue, we can examine how language establishes claims, incorporates evidence, evaluates ideas, and calibrates certainty. When students inform, we can show how language classifies, describes, defines, and organizes knowledge. When students narrate, we can examine how language sequences experiences and events.

But visibility is not the final goal.

We do not make language visible so that students become dependent on teachers, sentence frames, or permanent scaffolds. We make it visible so students can notice language resources, understand what they do, practice using them, make choices among them, and ultimately own them.

That distinction is critical. Visible Language Pedagogy is not about “fixing” students’ language or replacing the linguistic resources they already possess. It is about expanding their repertoire. Students gain additional choices for participating in disciplinary learning while retaining the language resources and identities they bring with them.

This connects to an idea I have written about for years: expanding students’ genres expands their meaning potential. When students gain access to additional ways of explaining, arguing, informing, narrating, interpreting, and interacting, they gain much more than additional vocabulary or grammatical structures. They expand the range of meanings they can make, the knowledge they can communicate, and the spaces in which they can participate.

Christie helps us see the problem: language can function as the hidden curriculum of schooling. Schleppegrell reminds us that leaving that curriculum hidden has unequal educational consequences. Hasan reminds us why language matters in the first place: language is a resource for living, learning, participating, and making meaning, not simply for producing structures.

Together, these ideas lead to a simple but consequential commitment:

Students should not have to guess how language works in order to participate successfully in disciplinary learning.

Making language visible means helping students see the choices, understand what those choices do, practice using them, and ultimately own them as resources for making meaning.

*If you want to use this reading in your professional learning, please request permission by contacting me at westerlundconsulting.com

References

Christie, F. (1985b). Language in learning: The hidden curriculum of schooling [Mimeograph]. Deakin University.

Hasan, R. (2011). Modes of learning, modes of teaching: Semiotic mediation and knowledge. In J. J. Webster (Ed.), Language and education: Learning and teaching in society (Vol. 3, Chapter 2). Equinox.

Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.