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Academic language is the set of words, grammar, and organizational strategies used to describe complex ideas, higher-order thinking processes, and abstract concepts.
General and Specialized Language
Each student starts with a foundation of language that has been building from early childhood. This foundation represents the language and thinking of family, home culture, and community. During the school years a student builds up other levels of general and specialized language from this foundation. An important layer is the general academic language of thinking and literacy that is used across the disciplines. This layer then overlaps with more specialized variations of thinking and language, four of which are prominent in school: math, science, history/social science, and literature. Over time all of the languages expand and even contract, depending on where students are and with whom they interact. Later, students often pick an area that becomes even more expanded with technical and professional language of the discipline. This often becomes their field of study and/or eventual job.
Bricks and Mortar
One way to help students build their languages is to train them in the use of linguistic “bricks” and “mortar.” Bricks and mortar are terms used to differentiate between content-specific vocabulary and general academic terms (Dutro & Moran, 2003). “Brick” terms, which are often big and boldfaced, are the technical words that are specific to a discipline. In science, for example, these words might include respiration, transpiration, meiosis, and habitat. Upon closer analysis, brick terms actually extend across a continuum from concrete to abstract-hard bricks to soft bricks, so to speak. For example, names, events, places and illustratable processes tend to be more concrete, while more philosophical, complex, and hard-to-visualize words (democracy, photosynthesis, balancing equations) tend to be on the abstract side. In middle grades and early high school, especially, students become inundated with many new bricks on the abstract side of the continuum.
The importance of vocabulary knowledge (i.e., knowing the bricks) is obvious and well-documented (McLaughlin et al., 2000; Moats, 2000; Stahl, 1999). Yet there is a danger of over-focusing on big words. If we simply pile bricks up to make a wall--e.g., overdo vocabulary quizzes and dictionary work--the wall will fall. The bricks need mortar to stick together. “Mortar” words and phrases, as the metaphor implies, are general-utility words that hold the content-specific technical words together. Other mortar words are used to create coherent and logical sentences and paragraphs. Some of these words include connectives such as therefore, however, whereas and because; prepositions such as behind, between, and without; and pronouns such as each other, themselves, and it. A more general group of mortar words includes academic vocabulary needed for the tasks, tests, and texts of school. These are often needed to describe higher-order thinking skills (Scarcella, 2003).
FUNCTIONS OF ACADEMIC LANGUAGE
To Describe Complexity
One of the main functions of academic language is to describe complex concepts as clearly as possible (Schleppegrell, 2004). Complexity abounds in many different forms in all content areas. Take a moment to think about the complex ideas and relationships in your content area. For example, in science there are complex relationships between different systems in the human body, complex calculations involved in chemical reactions, and complex geological forces that change the planet. In history there are complex historical figures who were both “good” and “bad,” complex causes and effects of major events, and complex conflicting historical records. In math there are complex ways to solve word problems, complex tables and charts to interpret, and complex applications of math to real world situations. In language arts there are complex relationships between characters, complex plots and literary devices to interpret, are complex ideas to organize and express in writing. You get the point.
To Describe Higher-Order Thinking
Academic language is used in school to describe complex thinking processes, often called higher-order thinking skills. These include cognitive processes that are used to comprehend, solve problems, and express ideas (Swartz, 2001; Facione, 1990). Many lists of thinking skills have emerged over the years, the most famous one from Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues (1956). They proposed six levels of thinking that progressed from knowledge to comprehension to application to analysis to synthesis to evaluation. Other researchers have argued that most classrooms use language for the following cognitive functions: analyzing, seeking information, comparing, informing, predicting, classifying, justifying, hypothesizing, solving problems, synthesizing, persuading, and evaluating (Valdez Pierce & O'Malley, 1992).
Researchers have also identified thinking processes by content area. Science tends to emphasize describing, classifying, formulating hypotheses, proposing different solutions, interpreting data, generalizing, and communicating one's findings (Chamot & O'Malley, 1986). And in history, students commonly need to describe, explain, define, justify, give examples, compare, sequence, and evaluate (Short, 1994). Math involves a heavy amount of application and problem-solving, while language arts typically requires lots of interpretation, analysis, and application. Most of the resources on cognitive skills, however, have not emphasized the importance of understanding and teaching the language that describes them, nor the implications for English learners and other diverse students. Even though students use these thinking skills beyond the classroom walls, they often need significant bridging from the ways in which they use and describe these thinking outside of school to the ways in which school expects.
To Describe Abstraction
A third function of academic language is describing abstract concepts. An abstract concept is a relationship between ideas that we cannot easily act out, point to, or show with images, as can often be done in home and social settings. For example, in the sentence, The connections are hard to visualize for many students (Snow & Brinton, 1997). One of our jobs as teachers is to build automaticity in the comprehension and use of academic language cues. This means helping students see words that trigger certain types of abstract thinking. Take, for example, the following abstract phrases: the long-term effects of a major war; evidence that supports the opposing position in a debate; interpretations of a character's words or actions; the similarities between two cultures, etc.” Looking at these examples, understanding the abstraction depends on one or more of the cognitive skills: cause/effect, persuasion, interpretation, and comparison. We must create classroom situations and tasks that train students to see this language, to understand the abstract thinking behind it, and then to engage in similar types of thinking in practice activities.
(Condensed from Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms)
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