Academic Literacies and Adolescent Learners: English for Subject‐Matter Secondary Classrooms

Abstract

Comprehensive high schools are extremely complex sites for the teaching and learning of academic literacies. However, current policy mandates emphasizing standards and accountability mask this complex ity. Legislation such as No Child Left Behind in the United States and similar initiatives in other countries narrow the curriculum (Afflerbach, 2005; McCarthey, 2008) through their emphasis on the teaching and assessment of discrete skills and features of language. Even as K-12 teachers are encouraged to focus on preparation for standardized tests and formulaic essays, the literacies required for success beyond high school are expanding in remarkable ways in terms of the multimodal information-rich technologies that pervade many professions and informal contexts, as well as the disciplinary literacy skills needed in subject-matter classrooms and specialized fields. Students in secondary schools represent another level of complexity, especially adolescents who are learning English as an additional language. Because secondary school is compulsory in the United States, comprehensive high schools serve recent immigrants who are well-educated in their native tongues, immigrants and migrants with limited formal educations, and Generation 1.5 students (Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999) who have been schooled mostly in the host country but are still behind native-born peers in terms of academic language and literacy skills in English. High schools educate these young people under intense time constraints, with graduation (and in many states, prerequisite exit exams) looming as a fixed high-stakes deadline. Many of these adolescents are still acquiring academic literacy in English when they enter U.S. high schools, often in New Mainstream (Enright, 2010a) classrooms that enroll monolingual English speakers together with multilingual students of varying English proficiencies, with little specialized attention to their unique language backgrounds and needs. The resulting dilemma is that many young people were not exposed to advanced academic literacies in their ESL classes and are unprepared for the academic literacy demands of New Mainstream subject-matter classrooms, where such skills are expected and required.