Paola Uccelli

The Challenge of Academic Language

Increasingly in recent years, educators have related worries about students’ literacy accomplishments to their lack of “academic language skills” (August & Shanahan, 2006; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Pilgreen, 2006; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002). Indeed, it seems clear that control over academic language is a requirement for success with challenging literacy tasks, such as reading textbooks or writing research papers and literature reviews. As early as the middleelementary grades, students are expected to learn new information from contentarea texts, so failure to understand the academic language of those texts can be a serious obstacle in their accessing information. Accountability assessments requiring written essays in persuasive or analytic genres are often graded using criteria that refer implicitly to academic-language forms. Even in the primary grades, students are expected in some classrooms to abide by rules for “accountable talk” (Michaels & O’Connor, 2002 which specify features encompassed in the term academic language. Despite the frequent invocations of “academic language” and the widespread concern about its inadequate development, there is no simple definition of what academic language is. What we consider “academic language” in this chapter is referred to in the literature using a variety of terms: the language of education (Halliday, 1994); the language of school, the language of schooling, the language that reflects schooling (Schleppegrell, 2001); advanced literacy (Colombi & Schleppegrell, 2002); scientific language (Halliday & Martin, 1993); or, more specifically, academic English (Bailey, 2007; Scarcella, 2003). As suggested by these terms, one approach to characterizing academic language is to resort to the contexts for its use – the language used in school, in writing, in public, in formal settings (see Table 7.1 for a more complete list). Thus, for example, Scarcella (2003) defines academic English as “a variety or register of English used in professional books and characterized by the linguistic features associated with academic disciplines” (p. 9). Similarly, Chamot and O’Malley (1994) identify it with school, defining it as “the language that is used by teachers and students for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge

Designing for Diversity: The Role of Reading Strategies and Interactive Vocabulary in a Digital Reading Environment for Fifth-Grade Monolingual English and Bilingual Students.

This study examined the relative contribution of reading comprehension strategies and interactive vocabulary in Improving Comprehension Online (ICON), a universally designed web-based scaffolded text environment designed to improve fifth-grade monolingual English and bilingual students’ reading achievement. Seventy-five monolingual English and 31 bilingual students from six classrooms were assigned to one of three ICON conditions: reading comprehension strategies, vocabulary, or a combined version of comprehension strategies and vocabulary. Students read eight multimedia folktales and informational texts within their respective ICON condition and completed embedded activities, researcher measures of comprehension and vocabulary, and pre- and postintervention standardized reading achievement tests. ANCOVA results indicated that after controlling for initial reading achievement, there was a main effect for condition on the researcher measure of vocabulary, with the combination group and vocabulary groups both significantly outperforming the strategy group. There was also an interaction effect, with differences between monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking students greatest in the strategy group. There was no effect of condition on comprehension, nor was there an effect of language status on narrative comprehension. However, there was a main effect of language status on expository text comprehension and standardized vocabulary achievement, with monolingual students performing more strongly than bilingual Spanish-speaking students. The results add to a growing body of research on the design and use of scaffolded digital text for diverse learners.

Core academic language skills: An expanded operational construct and a novel instrument to chart school-relevant language proficiency in preadolescent and adolescent learners

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in Grades 4–8. The results revealed between- and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was found to be predictive of reading comprehension. Our findings suggest that the CALS construct and instrument appear promising for exploring students’ school-relevant language skills.

Mastering Academic Language Organization and Stance in the Persuasive Writing of High School Students

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.

Understanding Depth of Vocabulary Online With Bilingual and Monolingual Children

The sheer quantity of words known (breadth) is strongly predictive of reading comprehension, yet little is understood about how quality of word knowledge (depth) affects comprehension. A group of 35 bilingual and monolingual 5th-grade students worked on developing depth of knowledge of 8 words, culminating in an activity in which the students produced captions for images related to each word. The captions were scored using a 4-point depth scale, and similarities and differences between bilingual and monolingual students were assessed. Results indicated a significant effect of depth of word knowledge in predicting reading comprehension, particularly for students with average to strong oral language skills.

Fifth-Grade Students' Digital Retellings and the Common Core: Modal Use and Design Intentionality.

Multimodal composing is part of the Common Core vision of the twenty-first-century student. Two descriptive studies were conducted of fifth-grade students’ digital folktale retellings. Study 1 analyzed 83 retellings in relation to the types and frequencies of modal use, such as image, sound, movement, and written text, as well as their retelling accuracy. Students composed within a scaffolded digital composing environment which comprised the PowerPoint authoring/presentation tool and a researcher-developed story frame. All students’ retellings included writing and visual design, 80% included animation, and 70% included sound. Retelling accuracy scores averaged 54%. Study 2 was conducted with a new group of 14 fifth-grade students who had previous digital retelling experience. The retellings included the same types of modal use, but at a higher level of frequency. In their retrospective design interviews, students expressed design intentionality and a metamodal awareness of how modes work together to create an appealing story.

Emerging temporality: past tense and temporal/aspectual markers in Spanish-speaking children's intra-conversational narratives

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components were analyzed to explore interrelationships among grammatical and discourse skills. Children progressed from scattered unsystematic means of encoding temporality to mastering a basic linguistic system that included devices to mark location of events, temporal relations and aspectual meanings. The consolidation of perfective past tense to express narrative events marked a crucial developmental point which preceded an explosion of additional verb tenses and temporal markers. The value of spontaneous language data, and the need to study grammar and discourse simultaneously to construct a comprehensive developmental picture are highlighted. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical proposals on the development of temporality.

Examining developmental relations between core academic language skills and reading comprehension for English learners and their peers.

Although many adolescents struggle to comprehend text, the school-relevant language skills, which might contribute to variation in reading comprehension ability during this developmental period, remain understudied. To expand the research base, this study examines the concurrent development of academic language skills and reading comprehension in a sample of emergent bilinguals (EBs) and their English proficient (EP) peers (n = 573) followed over two academic years, from Grade six to seven. Parallel process latent growth modeling results reveal that academic language and reading comprehension skills develop concurrently, with growth rates in Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) positively associated with growth rates in reading comprehension. Furthermore, initial levels of CALS predicted rates of growth in reading comprehension. We also find that EBs, who are by definition in the process of acquiring English, begin Grade six with CALS that are far below their peers, but develop these skills at similar rates as their EP classmates. Results reveal the potential for CALS-focused instruction for improving adolescent learners’ reading comprehension development, and highlight the particular relevance of supporting CALS for EBs, who are tasked with acquiring the language of print at the same time as they are acquiring other registers of English.