Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
CHAPTER 7
Increasingly in recent years, educators have cern about its inadequate development,
related worries about students’ literacy there is no simple definition of what aca-
accomplishments to their lack of “academic demic language is. What we consider “aca-
language skills” (August & Shanahan, 2006; demic language” in this chapter is referred
Halliday & Martin, 1993; Pilgreen, 2006; to in the literature using a variety of
Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002). Indeed, it terms: the language of education (Halliday,
seems clear that control over academic lan- 1994); the language of school, the language
guage is a requirement for success with of schooling, the language that reflects school-
challenging literacy tasks, such as reading ing (Schleppegrell, 2001); advanced liter-
textbooks or writing research papers and acy (Colombi & Schleppegrell, 2002); scien-
literature reviews. As early as the middle- tific language (Halliday & Martin, 1993); or,
elementary grades, students are expected more specifically, academic English (Bailey,
to learn new information from content- 2007; Scarcella, 2003). As suggested by these
area texts, so failure to understand the terms, one approach to characterizing aca-
academic language of those texts can be a demic language is to resort to the contexts
serious obstacle in their accessing informa- for its use – the language used in school,
tion. Accountability assessments requiring in writing, in public, in formal settings (see
written essays in persuasive or analytic gen- Table 7.1 for a more complete list). Thus,
res are often graded using criteria that refer for example, Scarcella (2003) defines aca-
implicitly to academic-language forms. Even demic English as “a variety or register of
in the primary grades, students are expected English used in professional books and char-
in some classrooms to abide by rules for acterized by the linguistic features asso-
“accountable talk” (Michaels & O’Connor, ciated with academic disciplines” (p. 9).
2002 which specify features encompassed in Similarly, Chamot and O’Malley (1994)
the term academic language. identify it with school, defining it as “the lan-
Despite the frequent invocations of “aca- guage that is used by teachers and students
demic language” and the widespread con- for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge
112
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
Audience
and skills . . . imparting new information, Indeed, this topic, which seems as if it
describing abstract ideas, and developing should be located in the exact center of
students’ conceptual understanding” (p. 40). educators’ concerns, is notably absent from
Whereas identifying contexts of use and the table of contents in the most up-to-date
purposes is important, a comprehensive def- handbook of educational linguistics (Spolsky
inition of academic language requires fur- & Hult, 2007). Ironically, although academic
ther specification. Scarcella (2003) identifies language skills are widely cited as the obsta-
three dimensions required for academic- cle to achievement for struggling readers
language proficiency: linguistic, cogni- in general, much of the empirical research
tive, and sociocultural/psychological. Bailey on academic language has been done by
defines being academically proficient as those studying English Language Learners
“knowing and being able to use general and (ELLs). In other words, learning ‘academic
content-specific vocabulary, specialized or English’ is recognized as a challenging task
complex grammatical structures, and mul- for second-language speakers of English, but
tifarious language functions and discourse the challenges faced by native speakers in
structures – all for the purpose of acquiring learning the rules, the structures, and the
new knowledge and skills, interacting about content of academic English have received
a topic, or imparting information to others” much less attention.
(Bailey, 2007, pp. 10–11; in press). One line of thinking about academic
Despite these advances in delineating language started with Cummins’ propos-
academic language, a conceptualization of ed distinction between Cognitive Aca-
academic language within a consensual ana- demic Language Proficiency (CALP) and
lytical framework that could guide educa- Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skill
tionally relevant research is still lacking. (BICS) – a distinction he presented as
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
a convergent view of what academic lan- guage that has passed some threshold quali-
guage involves, how it should be concep- fying it as academic.
tualized, where its boundaries are, and how
it might be assessed.
Certainly, members of the academy can Academic Language in Use:
identify violations of academic language Some Examples
in our students’ writing and may have
learned something about the features of aca- The example we analyze herein was an end-
demic language by working hard to stamp of-week paragraph produced by a middle-
them out in writings meant to communi- school student participating in the pilot
cate with practitioners or the general pub- implementation of a program intended to
lic. Despite these practice-based sources of promote knowledge of all-purpose ‘aca-
knowledge about academic language, the demic’ vocabulary in particular and use of
central concept remains somewhat inchoate academic language more generally. The pro-
and underspecified. In the absence of a con- gram was designed for use in an urban dis-
ceptual framework, it is difficult to design trict in which assessment had suggested that
instruction to promote academic language, students’ reading comprehension challenges
to properly assess academic-language skills, might be related to vocabulary limitations.
or to understand what normal, expectable Classroom observations in this district also
progress toward achievement of academic- showed that the vocabulary instruction that
language skills might look like. occurred was primarily focused on disci-
The goal of this chapter is to survey the plinary terms (e.g., sonnet, legislation, diges-
work on academic language in order to pro- tion, and rhomboid in English language arts,
vide an overview of its features as a basis social studies, science, and math, respec-
for proposing a pragmatics-based framework tively), whereas pretesting showed that a
that accommodates those many discrete significant proportion of the students was
features in a coherent model of communi- struggling with the more all-purpose vocab-
cation. Based on this pragmatic framework, ulary found in their texts, including words
we then propose a research agenda focusing like dramatic, interpret, sufficient, and decade.
on issues that would take our understand- The program consisted of week-long
ing of this important topic a step farther. units in each of which five ‘academic vocab-
Given the absence of an agreed-upon set ulary’ words were targeted. The five tar-
of criteria for academic language, we start get words (and other words of similarly low
by presenting an example of middle-school frequency) were introduced in the context
student writing to illustrate the rules of aca- of a paragraph about a topic selected to
demic language. We then turn to a more be engaging to young adolescents and to
formal inventory, based on theorizing about be somewhat open-ended (i.e., supporting
the differences between oral and written a number of different plausible points of
language, between informal and formal lan- view). The introductory paragraphs were
guage, and between narrative and expository written in a style that might be character-
language, because these three distinctions ized as ‘serious journalistic’ and each briefly
overlap with and contribute to a sharpen- presented two or more positions on the
ing of the definition of academic language. It topic of the week, with limited elaboration
is notable that academic language, unlike the of each position. The instructional program
categories of written, formal, and expository presented focused teaching about the target
language, has no clear opposite. We start, words (i.e., their varying meanings in dif-
then, from the assumption that language can ferent contexts, morphological analyses, and
be more or less academic – that is, furnished variants of them) as well as contexts for the
with fewer or more of the traits that are typ- students to use the words. Thus, some form
ical of academic language; we have no basis of debate about the issue in the paragraph
for postulating a separate category of lan- was recommended for social studies class
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
have not learned the material, so understanding Finally, comparing the student taking-a-
the work is very important. Without an educa- stand paragraph to the original paragraph
tion, attaining one’s career goals is very difficult. designed to stimulate thinking about this
Second, getting a good job is dependent on topic reveals still more academic-language
going to school. Today’s students are the future features.
leaders of the world. School could help them
understand how the world should be. EXAMPLE 1B. Paragraph prompt.
What is the purpose of school?
Analyzing the differences between Ex- Why do we go to school? One prime goal of edu-
amples 1 and 1a reveals some of the key cation is to transmit knowledge. Another is to
features of academic language. Example 1a enhance students’ capacities to earn a good liv-
eliminates markers of involvement (e.g., ing. Some would argue that schools should orient
you tell me! No!); removes redundancy students toward a set of shared values, in order
(the point about getting ready for eighth to facilitate the maintenance of a democratic
grade is made twice in Example 1, only state. Others contend that schools should help
once in Example 1a); moves from specific students develop an understanding of the per-
spectives of others, to promote social harmony.
and personal to generic formulations of
Still others think schools should teach students to
claims (eighth grade becomes education at
challenge authority, reject received opinion, and
higher levels; they don’t want to send us . . . think for themselves. Of course, if we accept this
becomes teachers will not promote . . . ); last version of what schools should do, then we
substitutes metadiscourse markers ( first, will have to expect that the curriculum will be
second) for more colloquial expressions (well massively adjusted and classroom activities radi-
first of all); compresses Example 1 clauses cally altered. Whereas thinking for themselves is
into adverbial phrases (without an educa- something educators value, students don’t always
tion) and nominalizations (getting a good have the license to do so in the classroom.
job); and imposes a consistent, distant, This adult-written paragraph reveals a
third-person perspective, whereas Example number of features not present in the stu-
1 shifts between first- and second-person dent paragraphs, as follows:
perspectives. Although more academic in
style, Example 1a is still not a particu- r
larly good response to the topic assigned lexical density
r modal verbs
because it is restricted to the same ideas r
presented in more or less the same order as endophoric reference
r abstract entity as agent (school)
Example 1. r
The paragraphs written by the middle- wide variety of connectives
r stepwise logical argumentation
grade students participating in this program r
were not devoid of academic-language fea- evidence of planning
r detached stance
tures. Some students provided overarch- r
ing initial or concluding statements, used authoritative stance
r lots of abstract/low-frequency vocabulary
metadiscourse markers, and incorporated r
the academic vocabulary they were taught. elaborate noun phrases (nominalization)
r markers of course of rationale
Nonetheless, the paragraphs, particularly r
in contrast to the more academic trans- deductive/inductive inference
lations one could provide for them, dis-
played language features inappropriate for Some of these features, such as the high
academic language (e.g., colloquial expres- density of relatively low-frequency words,
sions, involvement markers, redundancy) were deliberately introduced into the para-
and revealed characteristics of academic lan- graph to serve the purposes of the program.
guage that the students did not employ (e.g., Others were required by the argumentative
grammatical compression, generic state- genre; these included the logical progression
ments, impersonal stance, a variety of con- of the argument and the explicit marking
nectives). of different points of view. Other features,
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
such as the use of nominalization, were a lexical choices, and representational con-
product of efforts to keep the paragraph gruence (i.e., how grammar is used to
brief. Others, such as the authoritative and depict reality). Of course, the realization
detached stance, are simply the default aca- of all these features requires knowledge of
demic writing style. specific vocabulary and grammatical struc-
tures. In addition to these linguistic skills,
three core domains of cognitive accomplish-
Academic Language: An Inventory ment involved in academic-language per-
of Features formance are genre mastery, command of
reasoning/argumentative strategies, and dis-
Having explored examples of academic ciplinary knowledge.
language and its absence in actual practice, The typical interpersonal stance expected
we now must confront the issue of how to in academic language is detached and author-
conceptualize ‘academic language.’ A first itative. As we saw in Example 1, you tell me!
advantage of a coherent characterization and No! are markers of an involved style
of academic language might be the value that in Schleppegrell’s words form part of
of sharing it with struggling students. a “hortatory style that instantiates a con-
Schleppegrell (2001) argues that only rarely text of interaction” (2001, p. 446). In con-
are the linguistic expectations of school- trast, academic language requires a nondia-
based tasks made explicit to students, logical and distant construction of opinion,
despite the fact that students’ academic as well as “an assertive author [or speaker]
performance is judged considering these who presents him/herself as a knowledge-
expectations. Without explicit discussion of able expert providing objective informa-
linguistic expectations, academic language tion” (Schleppegrell, 2001, pp. 444–445) (for
constitutes an arcane challenge for many, an illustration of detached versus involved
and some explicit teaching about it might writing styles, see Schleppegrell, 2001,
be useful. p. 445).
Linguists and educational researchers The information load in academic dis-
have revealed features about which students course is characterized by conciseness and
might be taught through contrastive analy- density. Academic writing or speech is
sis of language corpora (e.g., Biber & Rep- expected to be short and to the point,
pen, 2002; Chafe & Danielewicz, 1987), evo- conveying information without unjustified
lutionary analysis of scientific language (Hal- repetitions. In Example 1, the repetition
liday & Martin, 1993), explorations of per- of being ready for 8th grade stands out
formances at different levels of expertise as a violation to the flow of information
(Schleppegrell, 2001), in different academic expected in such a piece of writing. In con-
disciplines (Achugar & Schleppegrell, 2005; trast to the typical redundancy of sponta-
Schleppegrell, 2007), and in specific gen- neous speech (Ong, 1982/1995), conciseness
res (Halliday & Martin, 1993; Swales, 1990). is highly valued, with only the minor excep-
Table 7.2 represents an effort to summarize tions of artful pseudo-redundant moves such
this literature, by organizing the many lin- as those included in abstracts or sum-
guistic features identified under the domains maries and conclusions. Besides, academic
of knowledge involved in academic lan- language packs a lot of information into
guage in a way that makes them some- a few words. This informational density is
what more tractable.3 The features listed evident in the high proportion of content
to the left are more characteristic of collo- words, usually achieved through nominal-
quial language, whereas the features toward izations and expanded noun phrases (Chafe
the right are more typical of academic lan- & Danielewicz , 1987; Halliday & Martin,
guage. Linguistic features are divided into 1993; Schleppegrell, 2001).
those referring to interpersonal stance, infor- At the syntactic level of organization of
mation load, organization of information, information, Halliday (1994b) subdivided the
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
Table 7.2. Linguistic Features and Core Domains of Cognitive Accomplishments Involved
in Academic Language Performance
1. Interpersonal stance
Expressive/Involved → Detached/Distanced (Schleppegrell, 2001)
Situationally driven personal → Authoritative stance (Schleppegrell, 2001)
stances
2. Information load
Redundancy (Ong, 1995)/ → Conciseness
Wordiness
Sparsity → Density (proportion of content words per total words)
(Schleppegrell, 2001)
3. Organization of information
Dependency (Halliday, → Constituency (Halliday, 1994b)/Subordination (Ong, 1995)
1993)/Addition (Ong, 1995) (embedding, one element is a structural part of another)
(one element is bound or
linked to another but is not
part of it)
Minimal awareness of → Explicit awareness of organized discourse
unfolding text as discourse (central role of textual metadiscourse markers)
(marginal role of (Hyland & Tse, 2004)
metadiscourse markers)
Situational support → Autonomous text
(exophoric reference) (endophoric reference)
Loosely connected/dialogic → Stepwise logical argumentation/unfolding, tightly constructed
structure
4. Lexical choices
Low lexical diversity → High lexical diversity (Chafe & Danielewicz, 1987)
Colloquial expressions → Formal/prestigious expressions (e.g., say/like vs. for instance)
Fuzziness (e.g., sort of, → Precision (lexical choices and connectives)
something, like)
Concrete/common-sense → Abstract/technical concepts
concepts
5. Representational congruence
Simple/congruent grammar → Complex/congruent → Compact/Incongruent
(simple sentences, e.g., You grammar (complex grammar (clause
heat water and it evaporates sentences, e.g., If the water embedding and
faster.) gets hotter, it evaporates nominalization, e.g.,
faster.) The increasing
evaporation of water
due to rising
temperatures)
(Halliday, 1993)
Animated entities as agents → Abstract concepts as agents
(e.g., Gutenberg invented (e.g., Printing technology
printing with movable type.) revolutionized European
book-making.) (Halliday,
1993)
Genre mastery
Generic Values (Bhatia, 2002) → School-based genres → Discipline-specific
(narration, description, (e.g., lab reports, specialized genres
explanation. . .) persuasive essay)
(continued)
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
Reasoning strategies
Basic ways of argumentation → Specific reasoning moves → Discipline-specific
and persuasion valued at school reasoning moves
(Reznitskaya et al., 2001)
Disciplinary knowledge
• Taxonomies
Commonsense understanding → Abstract groupings and → Disciplinary taxonomies
relations and salient relations
• Epistemological assumptions
Knowledge as fact → Knowledge as constructed
traditional category of subordinated clauses In Hyland and Tse’s (2004) words: “metadis-
into “hypotactic” and “embedded” clauses. course represents the writer’s awareness of
Hypotactic clauses are subordinated clauses the unfolding text as discourse: how writ-
that are dependent on but not constitutive ers situate their language use to include a
of other clauses, such as adverbial clauses or text, a writer, and a reader” (p. 167). These
those introduced by verbs of saying or think- authors developed a taxonomy of metadis-
ing (Colombi, 2002). In the following exam- course markers and their functions by study-
ple, clause a and clause b are hypotactic ing different types of texts. Additionally,
clauses: I concluded [that the party was a total information in academic language needs to
failure]a [because it ended before midnight]b. be organized according to a stepwise logi-
In contrast, embedded clauses form part of cal argument structure that makes sophisti-
another clause, such as clause a and clause b cated use of autonomous endophoric reference
in the following sentence: The party [which strategies instead of relying on situational
ended before midnight]a was a total failure context or underspecified references.
[that we hope will not be repeated]b . Whereas At the lexical level, a diverse, precise, and
some posit that addition and coordination formal repertoire that includes appropriate
are characteristic features of colloquial lan- cross-discipline and discipline-specific terms
guage that contrast with subordination and is desirable.
complex syntax (Ong, 1982/1995), Halliday The final level concerns representational
(1994b) persuasively argued that the crucial congruence, or the correspondence between
distinction is dependency (which includes language and the reality it represents. The
hypotactic subordinated clauses) versus con- concept of grammatical metaphor plays a
stituency (embeddedness). He argued that central role in Halliday’s model. Accord-
embedding is a distinctive feature of sci- ing to Halliday (1994a), in children’s com-
entific or academic discourse. If we con- monsense language, nouns refer to things,
trast the subordinated clauses in Examples verbs refer to processes, adjectives denote
1 and 1b, it becomes evident that embed- attributes, and connectives establish rela-
ded clauses are used only in the latter tionships. However, when these grammat-
text. ical categories are extended beyond their
Organization of information also involves prototypes (e.g., when nouns refer to pro-
explicit marking of text structures. Explicit cesses like evaporation or verbs refer to
awareness of text structure is indexed via relationships like precede), a grammatical
discourse and metadiscourse markers that metaphor, which Halliday calls a compact
have been widely explored in the literature. and incongruent form, is created. He argued
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
that experience is reconstructed when nom- Finally, all these linguistic features must
inalized forms such as evaporation are used; be coordinated with at least three additional
this term has the semantic features both of cognitive accomplishments: genre mastery
processes (water evaporates) and of things (Bhatia, 2002; Swales, 1990); command of
(because a noun prototypically refers to reasoning/argumentative strategies (Reznit-
things). In Halliday’s terms, these processes skaya, Anderson, Nurlen, Nguyen-Jahiel,
have been transformed metaphorically into Archodidou, & Kim, 2001); and disciplinary
virtual objects, “[t]he effect of this is to pro- knowledge (Achugar & Schleppegrell, 2005;
vide a less dynamic, more synoptic vision of Wignell, Martin, & Eggins, 1993). As stu-
the world, in which reality is as it were held dents advance in their mastery of these
still, rendered fixed, bounded and deter- three domains of knowledge, they learn
minate, so that it can be observed, mea- to put features of academic language at
sured and, if possible, explained” (Halliday, the service of genre conventions, persuasive
1994a, p. 14). Halliday emphasized that there and clear argumentations, and disciplinary-
would be no noticeable effect of sporadic specific relationships and concepts. These
uses like that but that academic language are three vast areas of research, which have
is profusely populated by these grammatical been the focus of work in fields such as
metaphors (in particular, nominalizations of English for Specific Purposes, the “Sydney
processes). school” of genre theory, and the Collabo-
Nominalization also creates lexical den- rative Reasoning approach, among others.
sity. The recursive linguistic principle per- Reviewing these three areas with the detail
mits nominalizations to function as embed- they deserve would go beyond the scope of
ded clauses of other propositions, allowing this chapter.
long, information-packed sentences. Fur- As we have seen herein, the claims that
thermore, in examples like The increasing have been made in the literature about the
evaporation of water due to rising tempera- characteristics of academic language result
tures is alarming, not only is the nominaliza- in a lengthy list of features. The mere length
tion phrase the subject of a longer sentence, of the list in Table 7.2 displays the prob-
but it also constructs the claim of relation- lem with our current conception of aca-
ship between rising temperature and evapo- demic language: dozens of traits have been
ration as assumed truth rather than a falsifi- identified that contrast with primary or col-
able claim, contributing to the authoritative loquial language and that might function
stance previously discussed. as markers of academic language, but it is
However, grammatical metaphor is not unclear that any of them actually defines
the only case of representational incongru- the phenomenon. Any of these traits might
ence. Another incongruent move of aca- be present in casual spoken language: Is it
demic language involves using abstract their co-occurrence that defines some lan-
concepts as agents. Whereas in colloquial guage as academic? Is it their frequency?
interactions, animate entities are typically How, if at all, do these various traits relate
the grammatical agents of sentences, aca- to one another? Are some particularly cru-
demic language often displays abstract con- cial and others merely epiphenomena? Are
cepts as agentive subjects of sentences. For some causes and others consequences? How
example, in Gutenberg invented printing with does the list in Table 7.2 help us with the
movable type, a noun that refers to a person is tasks of assessment or instruction?
the subject and agent of the sentence. How-
ever, the sentence, Printing technology rev-
olutionized European book-making, presents A Pragmatics-Based Approach
a noun that refers to an abstract concept to Academic Language
as agent, a less intuitive construction that
departs from our commonsense knowledge The problem with the inventorizing app-
of the world (Halliday & Martin, 1993). roach reflected in Table 7.2 is the omission
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
of attention to the overall rationale for these In many communicative exchanges, self-
features of academic language. In other representation is fairly straightforward (e.g.,
words, we start from the assumption that self as purchaser of a kilo of onions, self as
language forms represent conventionalized student in a first-grade classroom) and the
solutions to communicative challenges and message is relatively uncomplicated (e.g.,
that decisions about specific forms consti- How much do the Vidalia onions cost? 3
tute solutions to those challenges. What are plus 2 equals 5). The rules governing dis-
the communicative challenges to which the course structure, lexical selection, and gram-
features of academic language are meant to matical formulation for such exchanges are
respond? accordingly relatively easy to learn and to
In Figures 7.1 and 7.2, we present a first implement. Furthermore, formulating some
attempt to answer this question (and, in the frequently occurring but potentially chal-
process, questions about how the traits listed lenging messages has been greatly simpli-
in Table 7.2 relate to one another). Figure 7.1 fied by the availability of conventional forms
represents a view of language in which com- designed to express them (e.g., greetings,
municative goals are seen as driving deci- requests, apologies, condolences).
sions about specifics of expression. In this We argue, however, that characteristics
view, all communicative forms are a simul- of academic language represent an accom-
taneous solution to two tasks: representing modation to the two ubiquitous features of
the self and representing the message. Rep- communicative tasks – representation of self
resenting the self involves selecting (or per- and of one’s message – under particularly
haps simply having) a voice and a relation- challenging conditions (see Figure 7.2).
ship to the audience; representing the mes- The first condition is the need to formu-
sage requires conceptualizing some thought late messages that are relatively challenging
and figuring out what the audience already on any number of grounds – for example,
knows and needs to know about it. because the content is inherently compli-
Given a representation of self and mes- cated, because some of the concepts being
sage, then discourse and utterance fea- talked about are abstract or theoretical,
tures consistent with those prior frames are because some of the claims being made have
realized. an uncertain epistemological status, and so
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
Acknowledging status of
intangible non-interactive REPRESENTING THE MESSAGE
academic audience
and its level of expertise Selecting one of the approved academic genres
Displaying one’s knowledge/
Adjusting level of detail and
extending someone’s knowledge ORGANIZING DISCOURSE
amount of background
Emphasizing co-membership information provided to level of
Using discourse markers to emphasize the
with an expert academic audience expertise of the intended audience
integration of information, the causal,
temporal, or inferential relations being
Presenting a neutral, Representing abstract, theoretical
emphasized
dispassionate stance on constructs, complicated inter-
one’s message relationships, conditionals, hypo-
Expressing metatextual
theticals, counterfactuals, and other
relationships precisely
Selecting an authoritative voice challenging cognitive schemas
Figure 7.2. Nested challenges within a communicative event calling for academic language.
on. It is simply more difficult to explain tially rely on contextual support (e.g., point-
the process by which cells replicate, or the ing, enactment, gestures, deictics), but they
theory of evolution, or the various factors gradually learn to use language as its own
contributing to global warming than it is to context. Of course, autonomous discourse
negotiate the purchase of onions or respond skills develop throughout the school years
to an addition problem; therefore, the lan- and are needed in many nonacademic sit-
guage required must be more complicated.4 uations as well (e.g., talking on the tele-
The second challenge is to identify the phone, telling a story, writing a letter to
audience and the appropriate relationship a friend). From a communicative perspec-
between self and audience. An early devel- tive, what seems to make academic lan-
opmental task is to assess the listener’s guage particularly challenging, in addition
knowledge so as to provide sufficient infor- to the complexity of the message, is that the
mation and to gradually free language from components of the communicative situation
situational support. The additional commu- are less obvious and less accessible. In the
nicative challenges of academic language academic-discourse world, identifying pat-
require learning the traditions that govern terns of co-occurrences between specific sit-
discourse among participants in an intan- uations and linguistic forms is a much harder
gible academic community. The questions task. Approaches to this task taken by inex-
of who the audience is and what they perienced users of academic language range
know are crucial in appropriately framing from borrowing oral-language forms5 to imi-
the discourse in academic tasks, yet they tating experts’ discourse so slavishly as to
are not always easy to unravel for stu- verge on plagiarism.
dents. In face-to-face interactions, speakers Moreover, the producers of academic lan-
learn language by identifying co-occurrences guage need to establish their own level of
between language forms and situational con- authoritativeness and negotiate their rela-
text via repeated participation in similar tionship with a distant and potentially crit-
speech events with clearly identifiable par- ical or incredulous audience, through the
ticipants. In those situations, children ini- language forms chosen. Impersonal, generic,
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
and distancing forms are required because of displaying knowledge to or for some-
even if a personal relationship between one, that acknowledge co-membership with
the producer of academic language and the audience, that express the speaker’s
the audience does exist, that relationship unique voice within the ‘academic commu-
is irrelevant to the self being represented nity,’ and that make explicit the epistemo-
under conditions that call for academic logical assumptions under which the speaker
language. Thus, the intrusion of spoken- is operating. Those markers, then, must be
language involvement markers in Example 1 integrated with language forms imposed by
represents a violation of academic-language an adequate representation of the message
norms because involvement with the audi- to be conveyed, which in turn leads to deci-
ence is inappropriate under those circum- sions about genre (in the broadest sense),
stances. Control over modals and explicit about the audience’s level of background
markers of epistemological status (e.g., prob- knowledge to be presupposed and the level
ably, likely, undoubtedly, evidently, obviously) of detail to be included, about the mecha-
represents acknowledgment of the need to nisms for making reference to key concepts
be explicit about the credibility of one’s and interrelationships, and about the need to
claims. That need derives partly from the acknowledge sources of information. Having
obligation to represent the message accu- established what self and what information
rately and partly from the protection of per- will be represented, then text-specific deci-
sonal authority that comes from making rea- sions at the level of discourse organization
soned and modulated claims. (e.g., How will the organizational structure
Thus, the challenge lies not only in the of the discourse be signaled? How will rela-
audience’s physical absence but also more tionships of temporality, causality, depen-
profoundly in the somewhat indeterminate dency, conditionality, and so forth be talked
nature of this audience. Figure 7.2 describes about? How much anaphoric and exophoric
the audience as an “intangible noninterac- reference is permissible?) and clause con-
tive academic audience.” At school, even structions can be made.
though teachers are the ones who request Figures 7.1 and 7.2 present a relatively
assignments, students need to suspend their simplistic view of the nested relationships
personal relationship with their teacher and among these different levels; clearly, much
ignore what they know their teacher knows more work would need to be done to spec-
in responding. Instead, they need to imag- ify implications of a specific decision at any
ine a nonfamiliar audience with high levels of the levels for decisions at lower or higher
of language but without specific knowledge levels. Nonetheless, we hope that this rep-
of the target topic. resentation makes clear that the clause- or
In line with the pragmatics-based model discourse-level characteristics typical of aca-
proposed herein, we think that two essen- demic language may occur under other cir-
tial starting points for students are to (1) cumstances, but that the most likely condi-
gain an awareness of the desired relation- tions for them are in satisfying the demands
ship among participants in academic com- that are particular to self-representing as
munications; and (2) understand that mean- a member of the ‘academic-language–using
ing resides not only in what they say but community’ and that are imposed by the
also in how they communicate it. We are need to express complex content in efficient
arguing, then, that the long list of academic- and effective ways.
language markers reviewed in Table 7.2
can be sorted out usefully by fitting the
various items into this pragmatics-based Academic Language: A Research
understanding of academic language. Forms Agenda
that have to do with the largest task –
self-representation – are those that express The view presented herein makes no clear
authoritativeness, that perform the function predictions about the order of development
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
Whereas nobody would deny a bidirec- tioned in Table 7.1 should be considered to
tional influence of spoken and written lan- develop a precise picture of which skills are
guage, some researchers emphasize one side displayed under which circumstances.
as the source of more sophisticated skills.
Ravid and Tolchinsky’s (2002) intriguing
What Is the Normative Developmental
model of linguistic literacy proposes a bidi-
Course and the Ultimate Goal?
rectional influence; however, their model
states that basic features (e.g., basic syn- Teachers’ expectations and students’ skills
tax and phonology) are transferred from vary not only by grade but also by disci-
speaking to writing, whereas sophisticated pline and specific genres within disciplines.
features originate in writing and, therefore, In addition, academic-language skills can
exposure to and production of written lan- progress to reach highly sophisticated lev-
guage is the main factor in enriching linguis- els such as those used in sharing profes-
tic literacy. However, some complex fea- sional knowledge among a community of
tures might also transfer from spoken to experts. Within this range of possibilities,
written language, as Collaborative Reason- what should be considered the ideal devel-
ing studies demonstrate (Reznitskaya et al., opmental endpoint for academic-language
2001). Reznitskaya and colleagues show that development and, just as important, the
higher levels of argumentation or reason- minimal educational standards for different
ing can be achieved through the scaffold- grades and content areas?
ing of explicit discourse stratagems. To
construct a theoretical model that estab-
lishes associations or predictive relationships Teaching Academic-Language Skills
across modes of expression, research needs
Which Academic-Language Skills Should
to assess later language development so that
Be Instructed?
we can begin to understand which skills get
transferred under which conditions. Teaching about mechanisms for represent-
ing complex information – both as an ap-
proach to reading comprehension and as
Is Academic Language Truly More
an input to academic writing – could well
Grammatically Complex?
be helpful in supporting students’ devel-
Findings on syntactic complexity of aca- opment of academic-language skills. Here
demic language are not uncontroversial. again, however, the task may be primar-
Whereas many authors have pointed to ily one of expanding the learner’s reper-
a higher degree of subordination in aca- toire of useful stratagems for formulating
demic writing versus colloquial speech, oth- messages because children from their first
ers (Poole & Field, 1976) have reported more months of talking understand the challenge
embedding in spoken language. Tolchinsky of trying to express complex thoughts with
and Aparici (2000) found a higher degree limited language skills. Consider the child
of embedding in written than spoken narra- lexical forms formerly seen as overgeneral-
tives in Spanish but more frequent center- izations, such as calling the postman daddy
embedded relative clauses in subject posi- or calling horses cows; most child-language
tion in spoken than written expository texts. researchers would now argue that these are
As pointed out by Ravid and Tolchinsky simply immature attempts to comment on
(2002) and previously emphasized by Biber similarities or to refer despite lexical gaps
(1995), language features should be studied (Gelman, Croft, Fu, Clausner, & Gottfried,
taking into account the influence of register, 1998). Their occurrence suggests that even
degree of formality, and planning. In the young children can solve the problem of
study of academic-language skills, then, the expressing complex ideas, although in ways
three domains of knowledge identified in that may be unconventional and thus often
Table 7.2 and all contextual factors men- unsuccessful.
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
Exposure to talking styles that display fea- specific disciplines or genres are starting
tures of academic discourse and participa- to emerge (Lemke, 1990; Schleppegrell,
tion in academic genres is probably essential Achugar, & Oteiza, 2004). For instance,
for mastering academic language. Children content-based instruction (CBI) is a ped-
who come from families that value the accu- agogy for English as a Second Language
mulation and display of knowledge for its that integrates language and content-area
own sake, who require warrants for claims, knowledge with the purpose of improving
and who model and scaffold the organiza- both dimensions within specific disciplines
tion of extended discourse and sophisticated (Schleppegrell & de Oliveira, forthcoming).
utterances will probably have a much eas- These emerging approaches are promising,
ier transition into academic language. How- yet their design and effectiveness are still in
ever, documentation of how some families need of further study. How to make the lin-
support their children’s academic-language guistic expectations explicit to students, at
skills is sorely needed. what level of precision, and how to further
For school instruction, attention to lin- develop sociolinguistic and stylistic aware-
guistic form may be a powerful mechanism ness skills to improve academic-language
for improving students’ academic-language performance in the classroom are still open
skills. A traditional grammar approach research questions.
might be effective, but the value of a discus- A related challenge is how to pro-
sion about self, audience, purpose, and the vide instruction without prescription. Many
appropriate lexical and grammatical means genre-based classroom pedagogies have
to represent information in specific school been critiqued because of their prescriptive
tasks should be ascertained. Assuming that and hierarchical nature and the low trans-
teaching grammatical and lexical devices is ferability of skills produced (Fosen, 2000;
essential, we agree with a little-cited claim Kamler, 1994). Developing students’ soci-
made by Bakhtin (1942) decades ago: olinguistic competence, stylistic awareness,
familiarity with linguistic expectations, and
Without constantly considering the stylis-
command of lexical and grammatical fea-
tic significance of grammatical choices, the
instruction of grammar inevitably turns
tures of specific genres while emphasiz-
into scholasticism. In practice, however, the ing the individual creativity required for
instructor very rarely provides any sort of an expert mastery of the interplay between
stylistic interpretation of the grammatical form and meaning is a major challenge.
forms covered in class. Every grammatical
form is at the same time a means of rep-
resenting reality. Particularly in instances
How Do Planning, Revision, and
where the speaker or writer may choose Rewriting Improve the Advancement of
between two or more equally grammat- Academic-Language Skills?
ically correct syntactic forms, the choice In a conceptualization of academic language
is determined not by grammatical but by
as a construct that cuts across modes of
representative and expressive effectiveness
of these forms. Teaching syntax without
expression, exploring the effect of editing
providing stylistic elucidation and with- as a way of fostering acquisition and aware-
out attempting to enrich the students’ own ness of academic skills seems promising.
speech does not help them improve the Whereas encouraging students to edit their
creativity of their own speech productions own texts seems to be a successful approach
(quoted in Bazerman, 2005). to improving writing skills, little research has
explored the effect of rereading and revising
on students’ learning (Klein & Olson, 2001).
What Are Effective Pedagogical
Research suggests that frequent opportuni-
Approaches?
ties for authentic writing improve the qual-
Research-based pedagogical approaches to ity of students’ written products (see Klein &
teaching academic-language skills within Olson, 2001, for a brief review). Thus, would
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
frequent opportunities for editing texts have very early age (e.g., Genesee, 2005, 2006;
a positive effect on academic-language per- Genesee & Nicoladis, in press; Taeschner,
formance? If so, would the skills learned 1983) but that they become aware of the
transfer from writing to speaking? How ‘otherness’ imposed by speaking a minority
much guidance do students need so that language in public only somewhat later. Fur-
editing can effectively improve academic- thermore, understanding the relationship of
language skills? a language to an identity is rather differ-
ent from understanding how features within
a language express identity. Certainly, stu-
How Can Schools Provide Intervention in
dents do identity work through language
Academic-Language Skills to Students
in adolescence (Eckert, 1989), but it is not
Who Start Far Behind?
clear how much metalinguistic awareness
Children enter school with different linguis- they have about those linguistic decisions.
tic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic experi- Thus, it is worth exploring whether stu-
ences, and not all of them have been exposed dents might benefit from teaching designed
to the forms of communication valued at to make the problem of self-representation
school. Strategies to make children feel com- explicit because that is a source of impor-
fortable in expressing who they are and what tant academic-language features – but, at
they bring to school should be at the core the same time, a pragmatic force to which
of any instructional program. At the same they may be blind. One approach to this task
time, schools have the moral obligation to might be sociolinguistic exploration of ques-
provide all children with equal opportuni- tions like “How does the language of people
ties to participate in the discourse of aca- in power differ from the language of those in
demics that is a requisite for later academic subordinate positions?” Another approach
success. Children’s education can be based might involve text analysis to determine, for
in their own culture while also providing example, which markers readers use to infer
explicit teaching of the skills required for the writer’s level of certainty or to decide
success in the academic context of schools whether they consider the writer trust-
(Delpit, 1995). Snow, Cancini, Gonzalez, worthy.
and Shriberg (1989) found that meeting the
expectations of a formal academic regis-
Do Students Need Instruction in
ter, such as definitional discourse, correlated
Metasociolinguistic Awareness?
with academic success. Therefore, children
who are less skillful in academic language are Another somewhat different approach
less likely to succeed at school. How to pro- would be taken if we assumed that students
vide all children – ELLs and also struggling knew the importance of linguistically
native English speakers – with equal oppor- managing self-representation but lacked a
tunities of mastering academic language in a full understanding of the cues signaling the
way that incorporates and values their pri- appropriate representation for academic
mary discourses is yet another challenge. settings. In that case, a metasociolinguistic
curriculum might be appropriate, one that
specified the factors leading to the need
How Can the Role of Language in
for greater care in representing oneself as
Self-Presentation Be Taught?
knowledgeable or trustworthy (see Table 7.1
It is not obvious that all children auto- for a preliminary list of the situations that
matically see language as a form of do/do not call for academic language). How
self-representation. Evidence from children should talking to one’s friends in class differ
growing up bilingual suggests that they from talking to them on the playground?
choose the language that is effective for How does pursuing an intellectual dispute
communication (i.e., for formulating a mes- differ from arguing with one’s boyfriend?6
sage that is likely to be successful) from a Charting students’ knowledge about these
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
“Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Com- be friends, right?,” thus explicitly marking the
prehension: Development and Validation” distinction between the academic arguments
and “Improving Reading Comprehension for and the normal classroom relationships.
Struggling Readers.”
2 Register is a central notion in SFL. Register
References
is defined as “the constellation of lexical and
grammatical features that characterizes par-
Achugar, M., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2005).
ticular uses of language” (Halliday & Has-
Beyond connectors: The construction of cause
san, 1989). As elaborated by Schleppegrell
in history textbooks. Linguistics and Educa-
(2001, pp. 431–432): “A register reflects the
tion, 16 (3), 298–318.
context of a text’s production and at the same
August, D., & Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing
time enables the text to realize that context.
literacy in second-language learners: Report
In other words, the grammatical choices are
of the national literacy panel on language
made on the basis of the speaker’s percep-
minority children and youth. Mahwah, NJ:
tion of the social context, and those choices
Lawrence Erlbaum; Washington, DC: Center
then also serve to instantiate that social con-
for Applied Linguistics.
text. . . . Registers manifest themselves both
Bailey, A. (2007). The language demands of school:
in choice of words or phrases and also in the
Putting academic English to the test. New
way that clauses are constructed and linked.”
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Each genre has its own register features and
Bailey, A. (in press). From Lambie to Lam-
different genres can share many common reg-
baste: The conceptualization, operationaliza-
ister features. Genres are purposeful, staged
tion, and use of academic language in the
uses of language that are accomplished in
assessment of ELL students. In K. Rolstad
particular cultural contexts (Christie, 1985,
(Ed.), Rethinking school language. Mahwah,
as quoted in Schleppegrell, 2001). As stated
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
by Schleppegrell, certain lexical and gram-
Bazerman, C. (2005). An essay on pedagogy by
matical features are common to many school
Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Written Communication,
genres because they are functional for “doing
22 (3), 333–338.
schooling” (Schleppegrell, 2001, p. 432).
Berman, R. A. (2004). The role of context in
3 This table is organized in categories imposed developing narrative abilities. In S. Strömqvist
by the authors of this chapter. & L. Verhoeven, (Eds.), Relating events in
4 Note that we are not arguing here that aca- narrative: Typological and contextual perspec-
demic language is more complex overall than tives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 261–
other forms of language. Language forms con- 280.
stitute adequate responses to a variety of Bhatia, V. J. (2002). Applied genre analysis: Ana-
communicative challenges; thus, complex- lytical advances and pedagogical procedures.
ity can be manifested at different levels in In A. M. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the classroom:
various language exchanges. We are simply Multiple perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
highlighting one specific dimension of com- Erlbaum Associates.
plexity. More colloquial forms can be more Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of register varia-
complex in other dimensions – for exam- tion: A cross-linguistic comparison. Cambridge:
ple, in how linkages among clauses are indi- Cambridge University Press.
cated from one part of a discourse to another Biber, D., & Reppen, R. (2002). What does fre-
(Schleppegrell, 2001). quency have to do with grammar teaching?
5 For example, a paper submitted to a special Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24 (2),
issue of Hormones and Behavior that reviewed 199–208.
how the functioning of pheromones as social Blum-Kulka, S. (in press). Language, communi-
cues is mediated by brain structures included cation and literacy: Steps in the development
the sentence, “We thus conclude there is of literate discourse. In P. Klein & K. Yablon
something funky going on in the amygdala.” (Eds.), Modes of early education and their effect
6 It is worth noting that in one fifth-grade class- on improving education in school. The Initia-
room that implemented the Word Gener- tive for Applied Research in Education, Israeli
ation curriculum, the teacher often closed Academy of Science.
down the heated student debates on the topic Chafe, W., & Danielewicz, J. M. (1987). Prop-
of the week by saying “but we are still going to erties of spoken and written language. In
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
R. Horowitz & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), Compre- Genesee, F. (2005). The capacity of the
hending oral and written language (pp. 83–113). language faculty: Contributions from stud-
San Diego, CA: Academic Press. ies of simultaneous bilingual acquisition. In
Chamot, A. U., & O’Malley, J. M. (1994). The J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J.
CALLA handbook: Implementing the cog- MacSwan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Inter-
nitive academic language learning approach. national Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 890–
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 901). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Colombi, M. C. (2002). Academic language Genesee, F. (2006). Bilingual first language acqui-
development in Latino students’ writing in sition in perspective. In E. Hoff & P. McCar-
Spanish. In M. J. Schleppegrell & M. C. dle (Eds.), Childhood bilingualism (pp. 45–67).
Colombi (Eds.), Developing advanced literacy Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
in first and second languages: Meaning with Genesee, F., & Nicoladis, E. (in press). Bilingual
power, 67–86. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erl- acquisition. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (Eds.),
baum Associates. Handbook of language development, Oxford:
Colombi, M. C., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2002). Blackwell.
Theory and practice in the development of Halliday, M. A. K. (1987). Spoken and written
advanced literacy. In M. J. Schleppegrell & modes of meaning. In R. Horowitz & S. J.
M. C. Colombi (Eds.), Developing advanced Samuels (Eds.), Comprehending oral and writ-
literacy in first and second languages: Meaning ten language (pp. 55–82). San Diego, CA: Aca-
with power (pp. 1–20). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence demic Press.
Erlbaum Associates. Halliday, M. A. K. (1993). Some grammatical
Cummins, J. (1980). The cross-lingual dimen- problems in scientific English. In M. A. K.
sions of language proficiency: Implications for Halliday & Martin, J. R., Writing science: Lit-
bilingual education and the optimal age issue. eracy and discursive power. London: Falmer
TESOL Quarterly, 14, 175–187. (Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Edu-
Cummins, J. (1981). Age on arrival and immi- cation); Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
grant second-language learning in Canada: Press. (Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Lit-
A reassessment. Applied Linguistics, 2, 132– eracy, and Culture).
149. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994a). A language devel-
Cummins, J. (1984). Language proficiency and opment approach to education. In N. Bird,
academic achievement revisited: A response. et al. (Eds.), Language and learning. Papers
In C. Rivera (Ed.), Language proficiency and presented at the Annual International lan-
academic achievement. Clevedon, UK: Multi- guage in Education Conference, Hong Kong,
lingual Matters. 1993.
Cummins, J. (2001). Negotiating identities: Educa- Halliday, M. A. K. (1994b). An introduction to
tion for empowerment in a diverse society. 2nd functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Edition. Los Angeles: California Association Halliday, M. A. K., & Martin, J. R. (1993). Writ-
for Bilingual Education. ing science: Literacy and discursive power. Lon-
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural don: Falmer (Critical Perspectives on Liter-
conflict in the classroom. New York: The New acy and Education); Pittsburgh: University of
Press. Pittsburgh Press. (Pittsburgh Series in Com-
Eckert, P. (1989). Jocks and burnouts: Social cate- position, Literacy, and Culture).
gories and identity in the high school. New York: Hemphill, L. (1989). Topic development, syntax,
Teachers College Press. and social class. Discourse Processes, 12 (3), 267–
Fosen, C. (2000). Genres made real: Genre the- 286.
ory as pedagogy, method, and content. Paper Hyland, K., & Tse, P. (2004). Metadiscourse in
presented at the Annual Meeting of the Con- academic writing: A reappraisal. Applied Lin-
ference on Composition and Communication, guistics, 25 (2), 156–177.
Minneapolis, MN. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics:
Gelman, S., Croft, W., Fu, P., Clausner, T., & An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: Uni-
Gottfried, G. (1998). Why is a pomegranate versity of Pennsylvania Press.
an apple? The role of shape, taxonomic relat- Kamler, B. (1994). Gender and genre in early writ-
edness, and prior lexical knowledge in chil- ing. Linguistics and Education, 6 (2), 153–182.
dren’s overextensions of apple and dog. Journal Kieffer, M., Lesaux, N., & Snow, C. E. (in
of Child Language, 25, 267–291. press). Promises and pitfalls: Implications of
P1: KNP
CUUS443-07 cuus443/Oslon ISBN: 978 0 521 86220 2 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in October 27, 2008 8:52
No Child Left Behind for defining, assessing, Schleppegrell, M. J., Achugar, M., & Oteiza,
and serving English language learners. In G. T. (2004). The grammar of history: Enhanc-
Sunderman (Ed.), Holding NCLB accountable: ing content-based instruction through a func-
Achieving accountability, equity, and school tional focus on language. In TESOL Quarterly:
reform. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of
Klein, P. D., & Olson, D. R. (2001). Texts, tech- Other Languages and of Standard English as a
nology, and thinking: Lessons from the Great Second Dialect, 38, 67–93.
Divide. Language Arts, 78 (3), 227–236. Schleppegrell, M. J., & Colombi, M. C. (2002).
Lemke, J. L. (1990). Talking science: Language, Developing advanced literacy in first and sec-
learning, and values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex ond languages: Meaning with power (pp. 1–20).
Publishing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Michaels, S., & O’Connor, M. C. (2002). Account- Schleppegrell, M. J., & de Oliveira, L. C. (forth-
able talk: Classroom conversation that works coming). An integrated language and con-
[CD-ROM]. Pittsburgh, PA: University of tent approach for history teachers. Journal of
Pittsburgh. English for Academic Purposes.
Ong, W. J. (1982/1995). Orality and literacy: The Snow, C. E. (1990). The development of defi-
technologizing of the world. London/New York: nitional skill. Journal of Child Language, 17,
Routledge Press. 697–710.
Pilgreen, J. (2006). Supporting English learners: Snow, C. E., Cancini, H., Gonzalez, P., &
Developing academic language in the content Shriberg, E. (1989). Giving formal definitions:
area classroom. In A. Terrel & N. L. Hadaway An oral language correlate of school literacy.
(Eds.), Supporting the literacy development of In D. Bloome (Ed.), Classrooms and literacy
English learners. Newark, DE: International (pp. 233–249). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Reading Association. Spolsky, B., & Hult, F. M. (2007). Handbook of
Poole, M. E., & Field, T. W. (1976). A comparison educational linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Pub-
of oral and written code elaboration. Language lishing.
and Speech, 19, 305–311. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in aca-
Ravid, D., & Tolchinsky, L. (2002). Developing demic and research settings. Cambride: Cam-
linguistic literacy: A comprehensive model. bridge University Press.
Journal of Child Language, 29 (2), 417–447. Taeschner, T. (1983). The sun is feminine: A study
Reznitskaya, A., Anderson, R., Nurlen, B., on language acquisition in bilingual children.
Nguyen-Jahiel, K., Archodidou, A., & Kim, Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
S. (2001). Influence of oral discussion on writ- Tolchinsky, L. & Aparici, M. (2000). Is writ-
ten argument. Discourse Processes, 32, 155– ten language more complex than spoken lan-
175. guage? International literacy project working
Scarcella, R. (2003). Academic English: A concep- papers in developing literacy across genres,
tual framework. The University of California modalities, and languages, Vol. III. Barcelona:
Linguistic Minority Research Institute. Tech- Institute of Educational Sciences.
nical Report 2003–1. Wignell, P., Martin, J. R., & Eggins, S. (1993). The
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2001). Linguistic features of discourse of geography: Ordering and explain-
the language of schooling. Linguistics and Edu- ing the experiential world. In M. A. K. Hal-
cation, 14 (4), 431–459. liday & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Writing science:
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2007). The linguistic chal- Literacy and discursive power (pp. 136–165).
lenges of mathematics teaching and learning: London: Falmer (Critical Perspectives on Lit-
A research review. Reading & Writing Quar- eracy and Education); Pittsburgh: University
terly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 23 (2), of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh Series in Com-
139–159. position, Literacy, and Culture).