The Challenge of Academic Language

By Catherine E. Snow, P. Uccelli. 2009

596 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

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Citations in the corpus

Core academic language skills: An expanded operational construct and a novel instrument to chart school-relevant language proficiency in preadolescent and adolescent learners (2014, methodology): “Design informed by the story anagram task used by Stein and Glenn (1978) and by Cain, Oakhill, and colleagues in their reading comprehension studies (Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000).”
Same language, different functions: A cross-genre analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ writing performance (2016, background): “A sociocultural pragmatics-based view of language development understands language learning as the result of individuals’ socialization and enculturation histories (Halliday, Matthiessen, &Matthiessen, 2014; Ninio & Snow,1996; Ochs, 1993; Snow & Uccelli, 2009; Uccelli et al., 2015).”
Investigating English reading comprehension growth in adolescent language minority learners: some insights from the simple view (2011, background): “…of English reading development among Spanish-speaking LM learners remain lacking, especially during the middle school years when the demands of reading and extracting meaning from text increase (e.g., Bailey, 2007; Fang, 2008; Gandara & Rumberger, 2002; Scarcella, 2003; Snow & Uccelli, 2009).”
Contributions of Academic Language, Perspective Taking, and Complex Reasoning to Deep Reading Comprehension (2016, background): “Precise definitions or conceptualizations of academic language have varied widely (Snow & Uccelli, 2009), and in the practice and professional development literature academic language is still often primarily identified with use of “academic vocabulary,” itself a construct based on corpus analysis…”
Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition (2012, background): “Word Generation (Snow et al., 2009) is organized so students receive multiple exposures to the target words across content areas and employs reading, writing, and speaking practice opportunities.”
Beyond Vocabulary: Exploring Cross-Disciplinary Academic-Language Proficiency and Its Association With Reading Comprehension (2015, background): “To define academic language proficiency, Cummins – like several other researchers— pointed to the contexts in which academic language is used (Snow & Uccelli, 2009).”
Paucity and Disparity in Kindergarten Oral Vocabulary Instruction (2014, background): “However, as children enter school, there is a particular concern that they learn the academic vocabulary that is necessary for comprehension of school texts and participation in academic conversations across the content areas (Baumann & Graves, 2010; Snow & Uccelli, 2009).”
Evidence for the Importance of Academic Word Knowledge for the Academic Achievement of Diverse Middle School Students (2012, background): “Related to the scholarship reviewed by Snow and Uccelli (2009) is a body of”
Experimental Effects of Word Generation on Vocabulary, Academic Language, Perspective Taking, and Reading Comprehension in High-Poverty Schools (2019, background): “A major challenge of the texts students encounter after grade three is the new language structures included in them (Snow & Uccelli, 2008)—structures rarely encountered in spoken language and thus likely to be unfamiliar to students who have neither participated in text-based discourse nor read…”
Academic Language in Teaching and Learning (2012, background): “T H E notion of academic language is currently informing research focused on identifying ways that teachers can more effectively support children in learning (e.g., Anstrom et al., 2010; Bailey, 2007; Cummins & Man, 2007; Schleppegrell, 2001, 2004; Snow & Uccelli, 2009; Spycher, 2009; Zwiers, 2007).”
Improving Content Knowledge and Comprehension for English Language Learners: Findings From a Randomized Control Trial (2017, background): “…face educational challenges, including low achievement across reading, writing, history, mathematics, and other academic areas (Lesaux, Kieffer, Kelley, & Harris, 2014; Snow & Uccelli, 2009), and are at a disproportionately high risk for school dropout (Hernandez, 2012; Kennelly & Monrad, 2007).”