Academic Language in K–12 Contexts

Teaching Bilingual Learners: Effects of a Language‐Based Reading Intervention on Academic Language and Reading Comprehension in Grades 4 and 5

“…To the best of our knowledge, Uccelli and colleagues are the first researchers who have attempted to both theorize and operationalize academic language. The CALS construct derives from an interdisciplinary perspective on academic language that convenes secondlanguage acquisition (Cummins, 1979(Cummins, , 1991, systemic functional linguistics (Brisk & Zhang-Wu, 2017;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), and theories of reading comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990;Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).…”

“…Despite discipline-specific differences, however, there are also linguistic commonalities across content areas. Brisk and Zhang-Wu (2017) described a set of academic language characteristics that collocate across disciplines, including the presence of nominalizations, the passive voice, and multiclause sentences that cohere around conjunctions and connectives. Like the CALP framework, vocabulary knowledge is also central to systemic functional linguistics orientations to academic language, as academic vocabulary is often packed with conceptual knowledge that goes beyond simple word definitions (e.g., photosynthesis, democracy) and word meanings that can vary across disciplinary contexts (e.g., the word factor in history vs. mathematics).…”

“…This is problematic because proficiency in academic language and literacy is privileged in U.S. schools, as well as in many professional occupations, and as a result, command over this unique register of English is important for students to establish. As such, some educators have called for teaching academic language in support of bilingual students in school (e.g., Baker et al, 2014;Brisk & Zhang-Wu, 2017;Gebhard, Chen, & Britton, 2014;Uccelli, Phillips Galloway, & Qin, in press), whereas others have cautioned about this approach, expressing concerns about how bilingual students are characterized simply as lacking language and in need of remediation (Flores & Rosa, 2015;Poza, 2015;Valdés, 2004). In this study, we engaged these critical perspectives and were mindful in recognizing that students bring a breadth of linguistic knowledge and lived experiences to bear on teaching and learning (e.g., Goodwin & Jiménez, 2016).…”

“…Thus, although we have learned a great deal about academic vocabulary instruction over the years, the broad framework of academic language that we have described makes clear the need to move beyond vocabulary and more squarely into language. Reading research has converged on the critical role of language for comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990;Perfetti & Hart, 2002;Perfetti & Stafura, 2014), and conceptualizations of CALP (Cummins, 1979) and systemic functional linguistics (Brisk & Zhang-Wu, 2017;Schleppegrell, 2004) provide further nuance and contour to the nature of the types of language that are expected to predict reading outcomes for upper elementary school students.…”

“…The research base on providing academic language support for bilingual students has grown in recent years (see Baker et al, 2014;Brisk & Zhang-Wu, 2017). However, despite the growth, relatively few studies have investigated interventions that include attention to academic language and literacy skills for fourth-and fifth-grade bilingual learners.…”