Meaning Making
Meaning making at grades eleven and twelve continues to
be essential for students as they employ their language and
literacy skills to understand, interpret, and create text in ELA
and all other subjects. Text complexity continues to increase at
these grades as students read Shakespeare, seminal documents
of U.S. history, and works of American literature as well as
textbooks and other sources in government, civics, chemistry,
precalculus, and more. The standards at these grades expect
students to determine where the text leaves matters uncertain,
identify inconsistencies, and analyze how complex ideas interact
and develop. The standards also expect students to evaluate
the effectiveness of structures the author uses and determine
rhetoric that is particularly effective. These expectations have
implications for what teachers need to know about language and
how it makes meaning in different disciplines. Across the disciplines, teachers need to develop deep
understandings about language and how to make these understandings transparent to their students.
Making meaning with complex text often requires students to consider the text from different
perspectives. Bean, Chappell, and Gillam (2014) suggest that students first listen to a text or read
with its grain. “Listening strategies help you understand what to listen for, how to hear what the text
is saying, and how to track your evolving understanding of the text. The first time through a text,
reading with its grain, you are trying to understanding a text’s overall gist and compose a ‘rough-draft
interpretation’ of its meaning and your own response” (47). Similar to Elbow’s believing and doubting
game, students read with an open mind “looking at the world from the text’s perspective” (90).
Subsequently students read the text against the grain, viewing the text analytically and skeptically.
Bean, Chappell, and Gillam also call this questioning the text. “Importantly, questioning does not
necessarily mean fault-finding... [or] dismissing the author’s ideas wholesale. Rather, it entails
carefully interrogating a text’s claims and evidence and its subtle form of persuasion so that you can
make sound judgments and offer thoughtful responses” (70).
Elbow suggests a process of freewriting the reasons
to agree with an author’s argument (believing) and then
freewriting the reasons to disagree (doubting), identifying
the “problems, limitations, and weaknesses in the author’s
argument” (90). The standards at grades eleven and twelve
expect students to be able to hold contradictory evidence in
mind, determine its relevance and sufficiency, and synthesize
it to form a clear position and argument. These skills are
highly valued in college and work. Bean, Chappell, and
Gillam advise, “Your professors... expect you to offer your
own interpretations or evaluations, to launch a research
project of your own, to synthesize ideas from a number of
readings, and to draw independent conclusions” (70).
In the following snapshot, students in a twelfth-grade science class analyze the language in texts
as a way of making meaning. Although the snapshot is placed in this section of the chapter, it relates
to other themes, as well, including language development and content knowledge.
The standards at grades eleven
and twelve expect students to
be able to hold contradictory
evidence in mind, determine
its relevance and sufficiency,
and synthesize it to form a
clear position and argument.
These skills are highly valued in
college and work.Grades 11 and 12 Chapter 7 | 769