Abstract
Teaching academic language has recently become a separate focus from teaching subject content for schoolaged children, but it is rarely considered with preschoolers and kindergartners. The critical importance of fostering academic language before children enter elementary school has recently been posited and supported by various strands of research, and the term academic talk has been used to capture the fact that early exposure to and use of this register is in the oral modality only. There is a pressing need for an early focus on this register for children with language impairments, given that their language weaknesses often foreshadow academic difficulties. In this article, an integrative framework of academic talk developed by van Kleeck is used to discuss concrete ways in which professionals can foster the social-interactive and cognitive features of academic talk among young prereading children. A focus on these social-interactive and cognitive features, which provide a coherent and accessible conceptual framework for the interventionist, automatically recruits the many specific linguistic features that have been found to be characteristic of academic language. Previous research has directly or indirectly shown that preschool and kindergarten children’s exposure individually to each of these features is associated with future academic success. However, this previous research has not provided a construct for considering the full constellation of features that combine to create the academic talk register. This article provides ideas for approaching these features individually at first, but then posits the need to gradually combine a focus on more and more features simultaneously to more completely reflect the nature of the academic talk register.
Highlights
In research syntheses emerging since the year 2000, many scholars have discussed the critical importance of academic language for school success among school-aged children, and have distinguished this pattern of language use from one used for everyday social purposes [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Van Kleeck made the claim that it is imperative not to wait until children are school-aged to begin thinking about the academic language register; professionals working with children who are typically developing and those with Language Impairments (LI) need to begin fostering academic language during the preschool years [1,2]
For example, after sharing the book Mooncake with a child at least once, the adult might ask, “Do you remember that this story is about?” The adult could ask, “What might help us remember the story? Maybe if we look at the pictures, it will help us remember?”
Summary
In research syntheses emerging since the year 2000, many scholars have discussed the critical importance of academic language for school success among school-aged children, and have distinguished this pattern of language use (or register) from one used for everyday social purposes [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Van Kleeck made the claim that it is imperative not to wait until children are school-aged to begin thinking about the academic language register; professionals working with children who are typically developing and those with Language Impairments (LI) need to begin fostering academic language during the preschool years [1,2] She noted that for children with language impairment whose parents have lower education levels, which includes many from culturally (economically, racially, & ethnically) and linguistically diverse backgrounds, this need can be even more pressing, because these children often get much less exposure to academic language in their homes than do children from mainstream backgrounds. For each of these dimensions, it sorts how language manifests differently in these two registers at the lexical, sentence, and/or text levels
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