Academic Language: More than Just Vocabulary?

Two TESOL presentations got me thinking about what constitutes "academic language" at the K-12 level. What typically comes to mind when I hear this phrase is vocabulary: content-specific words such as plateau and condensation, as well as general academic words like source, process and analyze. But in a presentation called "Scaffolding Academic Language for ELLs at Every Proficiency Level," Christina Celic, a former teacher and author of English Language Learners Day By Day K-6, pointed out that vocabulary is just one part of the equation. Because academic language relies on so many sentence structures that aren't familiar to English language learners (even advanced ELLs), we must also be sure to explicitly break down some of its key elements:

* Academic language is typically written in the passive voice (e.g.,water vapor is released from plants during transpiration).
* It includes many signal words (e.g., likewise, moreover, in spite of).
* It contains nominal phrases (higher, cooler parts of the atmosphere).
* It uses multiple clauses.

In a separate presentation, "Oral Language Development in the Grade-level Content Classroom," Mary Lou McCloskey and Linda New Levine outlined specific challenges in teaching the academic language of science. The following excerpt offers some good examples and is taken from a handout available here:

Specific grammatical structures include:
* passive voice: is shown, was found, has been explained, etc.
* modals: possibly, could, might be, would, etc.
* embedded clauses: The latest research, developed from laboratories on three continents, indicates that…
* complex sentences: A growing number of research studies suggests, however, that such an increase in temperature could have a large impact on life, especially in coastal regions of North America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Science text organizational structures:
*steps of a process: Following evaporation, water vapor cools and falls to the Earth as rain or snow.
*cause and effect: As a result of auto emissions, nitric oxide and sulfur dioxide combine with water in the air.
* main idea and details: The biomes in this area consist of grasslands, scrublands, deserts, and deciduous forests.

Generation 1.5

The first workshop I attended at the TESOL Convention, "Supporting Your Non-ESL Colleagues Who Teach ESL Students," considered some of the characteristics of Generation 1.5. As its name suggests, this group is made up of students who fall somewhere (culturally and linguistically) between first-generation immigrants and second-generation children born in the States. Most of the time they are found in mainstream classrooms in public schools. While the U.S. may be the only place that members of Generation 1.5 have ever called home, they are raised in linguistic enclave communities.

The notion that the term "English language learner" can mean many different things, and reflect a broad range of very specific needs, is pretty basic. But in my view, this isn't always obvious, and it isn't always recognized.

Consider the student who comes to the U.S. at age 10, who is literate in her native language and has already received some English instruction in an academic setting. The challenges she faces will differ from those of a native-born child who has no accent but is encountering academic vocabulary and language for the first time at school--and who will likely never achieve full proficiency in his native tongue.

Because of this, the workshop presenters stressed that true proficiency cannot be measured by how fluent students sound or by how long they have been in the country. To understand what ELLs really need, we must first consider where and how they are encountering the type of language that is required for school.

The text below is from this handout provided at the training:

Several linguistic and socioeconomic factors make the acquisition processes of Generation 1.5 different from that of typical English learners:

1. They acquire much of their English through informal oral/aural interaction with friends, classmates, and co-workers (very often community dialect speakers) through interaction with English-dominant siblings and members of the extended family, and of course passive input from radio and TV.

2. As oral/aural dominant they may not notice nonsalient grammatical features, and thus these features never become part of their language repertoire. (They may use incorrect verb forms, word forms, confuse count/non count nouns, plurals, articles, prepositions, etc. Example: don't see the difference between "confident" vs "confidence")

3. In their speech they rely heavily on context and other pragmatic features of discourse rather than syntactic and morphological specificity. (Use body language, intonation, facial expression etc. to make themselves understood. Communicating in writing may be frustrating because lack these cues. Proofreading is difficult--may not be able to "hear" mistakes.)

4. They become highly proficient communicators, but face difficulty when confronted with academic writing tasks that demand a high level of grammatical accuracy.

5. Oral/aural learners generally lack the "meta-language" and grammatical terminology necessary for understanding explanations of their grammar errors. (So when teachers talk about progressive verbs or gerunds, for example, student may look blank.)