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