Academic Language Development Research Articles

What's on the “LO” Menu? Supporting Academic Language Objective Development

To effectively serve culturally and linguistically diverse students in public schools, many pedagogical models call for the integration of content and language instruction. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) also present increased attention to how language is conceptualized for all students. One technique to heighten both teacher and student focus on academic language is via the use of language objectives in tandem with content objectives. In this article, the authors offer a language objective (LO) menu from which teachers can identify the language demands of their lessons, recognize student needs relative to those demands, and select appropriate instructional strategies to meet language objectives. Sample language demands, objectives, and strategies are provided for elementary, middle, and high school academic language development.

Using a functional linguistics metalanguage to support academic language development in the English Language Arts

This article reports on a design-based research project that used grammatical metalanguage from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to support primary level English Language Learners’ engagement with academic language in English Language Arts. Researchers and teachers developed lessons to support students’ ability to interpret and evaluate characters’ attitudes in literary texts through an explicit focus on language. An analysis of classroom conversations shows that SFL metalanguage has the potential to support students’ content learning in the context of dialogic interaction during meaningful curricular activity supported by scaffolding artifacts. We show that the metalanguage supports elaboration and enactment of meaning and exploration of patterns in language and author's purpose in the texts students read. This results in extended discourse by students in which they also connect text meaning to their personal experiences. We suggest that this approach offers new affordances for supporting ELLs’ engagement in challenging curricular tasks at the same time they develop academic language.

Tracking movement toward academic language in multilingual classrooms

Learning history depends heavily on language and cultural references that students supposedly already know. Understanding how young people from multilingual backgrounds develop language in content area classrooms can help us better assist students to achieve higher levels of literacy needed to understand discipline-specific knowledge. Using the conceptual framework and analytic tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994) we analyze the changes in lexico-grammatical and discourse-semantic choices in learners' responses to two primary source history texts as indexes of academic language development. The data comes from a larger study that explored the integration of text analysis to history lessons focusing on primary sources and documenting the impact of the intervention on students' disciplinary literacy development. In this paper, we focus on the configuration of linguistic indices that serve to track academic language development. The analysis shows changes in students' linguistic choices that realize ways of reasoning and arguing typical of history. The findings show that it is important to document academic language development in qualitative ways that capture the complexity of development considering constellations of linguistic features and how they function to serve discipline-specific ways of making meaning.

Teachers’ use of linguistic scaffolding to support the academic language development of first-grade emergent bilingual students

Research suggests that teachers need to scaffold emergent bilingual students as they develop the complex language associated with school success. This may especially be true in dual language settings, where children are learning two languages simultaneously. In this study, therefore, I investigate the linguistic scaffolding practices of first-grade dual language teachers as they support academic language development for their Spanish-dominant students. Academic language is viewed not only as a set of linguistic components but also as a way of accomplishing certain functions and participating in context-reduced communication. Findings indicate that teachers engage in scaffolding both within and across lessons, providing insights into ways teachers can support academic language development for emergent bilingual students in general.

Examining the text-based, on-demand, analytical writing of mainstreamed Latino English learners in a randomized field trial of the Pathway Project intervention

This study reports on the effects of the Pathway Project, a professional development intervention aimed at supporting the academic language development of English Learners (ELs). Using a subset of data collected during a multi-site cluster randomized controlled trial involving nine middle and six high schools in an urban, low-income school district over 3 years, this study examines how the Pathway Project intervention impacted ELs’ abilities to analyze literature, use academic words, and include commentary in their essays. A total of 103 English teachers were stratified by school and grade and randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. Each year, Pathway teachers participated in 46 hours of training and learned how to apply a cognitive strategies approach to literacy instruction in order to help students understand, interpret, and write analytical essays about themes in literature. Through a textual analysis of 300 randomly sampled pre- and 300 post-intervention essays collected from 1,640 mainstreamed secondary ELs (820 experimental and 820 control), this study examined the ways in which the intervention impacted the writing outcomes of secondary ELs. A univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the students’ literary analysis and the use of commentary in their essays with the number of years in the treatment condition as the independent variable revealed significant effects of the intervention on the afore-mentioned posttest measures, with students who received 2 years of the intervention outperforming those who received only 1 year of the intervention.

Developing the Academic Collocation List (ACL) – A corpus-driven and expert-judged approach

This article describes the development and evaluation of the Academic Collocation List (ACL), which was compiled from the written curricular component of the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE) comprising over 25 million words. The development involved four stages: (1) computational analysis; (2) refinement of the data-driven list based on quantitative and qualitative parameters; (3) expert review; and (4) systematization. While taking advantage of statistical information to help identify and prioritize the corpus-derived collocational items that traditional manual examination are unable to manage, we argue that only with human intervention can a data-driven collocation listing be of much pedagogical use. Focusing on lexical collocations only, we present a new Academic Collocation List compiled using a mixed-method approach of corpus statistics and expert judgement, consisting of the 2,468 most frequent and pedagogically relevant entries we believe can be immediately operationalized by EAP teachers and students. By highlighting the most important cross-disciplinary collocations, the ACL can help learners increase their collocational competence and thus their proficiency in academic English. The ACL can also support EAP teachers in their lesson planning and provide a research tool for investigating academic language development.

Mandatory trialling of support services by international students: what they choose and how they reflect

This paper evaluates a strategy to promote the uptake of support services by international students (ISs) at an Australian university. As part of their assessment, ISs completed a so-called ‘University Service Reflection Task’ (USRT) in a core first-year course. To complete the USRT, all ISs accessed one support service (e.g. language consultation, study skills workshop, careers guidance), then submitted a written reflection about the experience. Using responses to a questionnaire by 155 participants, the researchers investigated which services ISs attended for the USRT and patterns of prior attendance. Students' perspectives were explored by analysing 73 reflective essays. The results showed that two-thirds of the students participated in a service for the first time in order to complete the USRT and favoured services that had closest application to their coursework. Students expressed positive feelings about their experiences and reported learning gains, particularly in the areas of study skills and development of academic language.

Preschool Teachers' Perception and Use of Hearing Assistive Technology in Educational Settings

This study explored how often sound-field amplification and personal frequency-modulated (FM) systems are used in preschool classrooms, teacher perceptions of advantages and disadvantages of using hearing assistive technology, and teacher recommendations for hearing assistive technology use. The study used a cross-sectional survey design. Participants were professionals who provided services to preschool-age children who are deaf or hard of hearing in public or private schools. A total of 306 surveys were sent to 162 deaf education programs throughout the United States; 99 surveys were returned (32%). Simple statistics were used to describe the quantitative survey results; content analysis was completed on open-ended survey comments. Surveys were received from teachers working at listening and spoken language preschool programs (65%) and at bilingual-bicultural and total communication preschool programs (35%). Most respondents perceived that hearing assistive technology improved students' academic performance, speech and language development, behavior, and attention in the classroom. The majority of respondents also reported that they definitely would or probably would recommend a sound-field system (77%) or personal FM system (71%) to other educators. Hearing assistive technology is frequently used in preschool classrooms of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, with generally positive teacher perceptions of the benefits of using such technology.

Do They Make a Difference? The Impact of English Language Programs on Second Language Students in Canadian Universities

Few studies have investigated the impact of English language programs on second language (L2) students studying in Canadian universities (Cheng & Fox, 2008; Fox, 2005, 2009). This article reports on questionnaire responses of 641 L2 students studying in 36 English language programs in 26 Canadian universities. The researchers identified programs by their activity emphasis as either English as a second language (ESL) or English for academic purposes (EAP). Activity emphasizing speaking, social interaction, and general language development was viewed as ESL, whereas activity that emphasized academic reading, writing, and language development was considered EAP. The researchers used structural equation modeling procedures to examine the network of relationships between language program emphasis and participants' background characteristics in influencing academic and social engagement. A model of moderated mediation (Wu & Zumbo, 2008) was confirmed; that is, language program activities were found to account for variation in strategies which mediated academic and social engagement. However, the impact was moderated (lessened or strengthened) by three personal background factors: anxiety, stress, and motivation. This study refines our understanding of the positive impact of ESL and EAP programs on L2 university students' academic and social engagement.

Not Just Good Science Teaching: Supporting Academic Language Development

In this article, the authors explore ways in which they have worked together in understanding the complexities of academic language within the science classroom and discuss strategies they have used to teach academic language to young adolescent English Language Learners (ELLs) within inquiry-based science lessons.— They discuss strategies they use to explicitly teach linguistic components of academic language and provide examples of ways they support ELLs in understanding how mathematical expression and visual representation support meaning making with the hybrid language of academic science.

Developing and assessing beginning teacher effectiveness: the potential of performance assessments

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is an authentic tool for evaluating prospective teachers by examining their abilities to plan, teach, assess, and reflect on instruction in actual classroom practice. The PACT seeks both to measure and develop teacher effectiveness, and this study of its predictive and consequential validity provides information on how well it achieves these goals. The research finds that teacher candidates’ PACT scores are significant predictors of their later teaching effectiveness as measured by their students’ achievement gains in both English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. Several subscales of the PACT are also influential in predicting later effectiveness: These include planning, assessment, and academic language development in ELA, and assessment and reflection in mathematics. In addition, large majorities of PACT candidates report that they acquired additional knowledge and skills for teaching by virtue of completing the assessment. Candidates’ feelings that they learned from the assessment were the strongest when they also felt well-supported by their program in learning to teach and in completing the assessment process.

Language and academic achievement: Perspectives on the potential role of indigenous African languages as a lingua academica

Although research literature abounds with studies that show the importance of language for academic achievement, the potential role of indigenous African languages in the educational sector in South Africa has not been adequately appraised or appreciated. Accordingly, ambivalence is still rife among parents, teachers, learners and government about the use of these languages for academic purposes. This ambivalence is evident from the existing national language education policies, school language policies, language curricula and language practices in schools. Thus, the purpose of this article is to discuss the perspectives on the potential role of indigenous African languages for academic purposes in South Africa. The focus is mainly on the use of these languages to provide a scaffold for academic language proficiency which is critical to academic success. To this end, a complementary language-use framework or model for using indigenous African languages to support the development of academic language in multilingual schools and universities is proposed.

Multiple Dimensions of Academic Language and Literacy Development

Language, literacy, and culture intersect almost everywhere, of course. I analyze three phenomena where intersections occur between cognitive skills, personal attitudes, social practices, and macro‐societal structures in ways that are salient, puzzling, and also illuminating about the multiple dimensions of learning literacy in situations of cultural and linguistic diversity: (a) heuristic search strategies involving language switching for choices of words and phrases while composing, (b) expressions of personal identity when writing for specific discourse communities, and (c) reciprocal modeling during dynamic assessments of writing and reading. Examples are drawn from research in Toronto with multilingual students entering university programs and with “at‐risk” adolescents in a community‐based, after‐school tutoring program. The analyses set an agenda for future research and educational practices to help develop the multifaceted dimensions of developing academic literacy among culturally diverse learners.

The Role of Metalanguage in Supporting Academic Language Development

Recent currents in language learning research highlight the social and emergent aspects of second language (L2) development and recognize that learners need opportunities for interaction in meaningful contexts supported by explicit attention to language itself. These perspectives suggest new ways of conceptualizing the challenges faced by children learning L2s as they learn school subjects. This article reports on design‐based research in U.S. schools with a majority of English language learners, where teachers were supported in using Systemic Functional Linguistics metalanguage in the context of curricular activities. This work illustrates how a meaningful metalanguage can support L2 learners in accomplishing challenging tasks in the primary school curriculum at the same time that it promotes the kind of focused consciousness‐raising and explicit talk about language that has been shown to facilitate L2 development. Examples from classroom research exemplify how metalanguage supports the situated and contextual language learning that current research in education and L2 acquisition calls for, while also supporting disciplinary goals and activities in English language arts.

A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualising content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education

AbstractSchool-level learners who study curricular content in a language that is not their first require active support in their development of academic language, ideally in conjunction with working on said content. However, content teachers naturally orient towards the learning goals formulated for their respective subjects, while language teachers do not routinely consider them. This situation could be resolved if a zone of convergence between content and language pedagogies could be established. In this paper I argue that cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) constitute such a zone of convergence as the cognitive processes involving subject-specific facts, concepts and categories are verbalized in recurring and patterned ways during the event of co-creating knowledge in the classroom. While numerous publications make reference to such discourse functions, no coherent and theoretically explicit model of CDFs exists to date. The main purpose of this paper is, therefore, to introduce such a model that is theoretically explicit and conceptually anchored in both education and linguistics. Initial evidence for the empirical grounding of the construct is presented and suggestions are made for the further elaboration, consolidation and use of the CDF Construct introduced in this article.

The Teaching Using Technology Studio: Innovative Professional Development to Meet the Needs of English Learners

This study investigated the impact of an innovative professional development initiative on teachers' ability to use technological resources to improve English learners' academic language. The Teaching Using Technology Studio, a collaborative effort between school district and university personnel, was designed as a responsive professional development program for 16 upper elementary teachers in California. Pre–post scores on a knowledge/use scale and a Teacher Technology Proficiency Assessment, as well as teacher reflections, interviews, classroom observations, and field notes, showed significant changes in the teachers' knowledge of and ability to use technology to develop activities and lessons designed to impact academic language development. Student scores on district benchmark assessments and on the annual state assessment suggest that teachers' participation in this professional development initiative led to positive academic language outcomes for the English learners in their classrooms.

An exploration of planning for English-as-foreign-language (EFL) academic language development

This paper arises from a concern that in English-as-foreign-language (EFL) curricula there are apparently unsystematic and linguistically under-theorized approaches to language development. The paper explores EFL unit plans across upper primary and lower secondary schooling, in a context where secondary school graduates need English mainly for academic purposes. Such plans are important because worthwhile learning generally relates to planning quality. Planning includes the selection of relevant and appropriate texts. The focus of this paper, therefore, is on the evaluation of the extent to which the texts in the unit plans might enable English academic language development. The paper employs systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to analyze four texts directly linked to academic writing tasks, within a sub-set of unit plans from a larger study's database of taught unit plans. The analysis reveals evidence of limitations in academic language development planning. Such limitations are highly problematic in contexts where EFL is needed for academic purposes. I argue for more theoretically grounded, cumulative, explicit developmental progression in EFL planning documents; more visibility of language itself in planning EFL development; and a more relevant discourse-level model of language which can be judiciously applied to planning processes across educational levels.

Targeted, timely, learning support for international students: One Australian university’s approach

This paper documents the approach taken by an Australian University to enhance student study skills, development of academic language, and writing skills. The Curtin Business School (CBS) has the only fully faculty-based student learning support centre at Curtin University in Western Australia. Called the CBS Communication Skills Centre (CSC) it has seven academic staff charged with enhancing learning outcomes, intercultural communication and study proficiency for a diverse student cohort having a large proportion of international students. Described here is the CSC approach to using a suite of targeted services and collaborative practices in multiple academic disciplines to assist transnational learning. Challenges faced by international students using learning support services, and by staff designing and delivering those services in an Australian University form part of this discussion.

The Quality of Writing Tasks and Students’ Use of Academic Language in Spanish

This study investigates the quality of the writing tasks assigned to native Spanish speakers in bilingual (Spanish-English) contexts, and the relationship between task quality and students’ use of an academic register in their native language. Fifty-six language arts tasks were collected from 26 grade 4 and 5 teachers, and four student writing samples were collected in response to each task (N = 224). Multilevel modeling revealed that variation in students’ use of key features of academic language in their writing was associated with the cognitive demand of writing tasks. Findings suggest that students’ opportunities to respond to challenging tasks when writing in their native language are rare and that the rigor of writing tasks may relate to students’ production and development of academic language.

Hope is the thing with metaphors: de-situating literacies and learning in English Language Arts classrooms

In this article, we examine the relationship between classroom talk, teacher–student roles and paradigms for literacy and learning in two ninth-grade English Language Arts classes. Our goal was to understand how these roles and practices socialized students into norms for academic language and literacy as they read and wrote poetry in preparation for a high-stakes standardized essay. Drawing from social and critical approaches to literacy, we describe how a policy-driven narrowing of the curriculum also narrowed conceptions of literacy and knowledge. Differences in the treatment of students’ poems versus the Dickinson poem positioned students as unable to co-construct knowledge. The high-stakes essay, not yet assigned, drove almost all discourse about text, meaning and legitimate knowledge, essentially ‘de-situating’ literacy from the tasks and immediate context and prioritizing technical skills over communicative purposes. Implications for research, teaching and students’ development of academic language and literacy address the tension between meaningful literacy instruction and accountability demands of contemporary classrooms.