A Look into Academic Language

What has historically happened to ELL’s is that they are placed in remedial classes according to their low language abilities. According to research by Jim Cummins (1984), teachers in a Canadian study had placed many ESL students in special education classes, thinking that their academic difficulties they experienced had to do with cognitive rather than linguistic factors. Cummins argued that these students had developed conversational fluency (BICS- basic interpersonal communicative skills), which are much easier to master in everyday conversations, but had not yet developed CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency), which is the command of the academic language and register of the school. He suggests that just because L2 students can carry on a conversation in English, does not mean that they have the specific language needed to understand or be successful in school related tasks (reading, writing, vocabulary development). This study is important to recognize that ESL students’ lack of vocabulary is not indicative of level of intelligence, and they need to be challenged as much as their EO counterparts.

Supporting Cummin’s findings, Pauline Gibbons (2009) suggests that ELLs achieve at higher levels when they participate in an intellectually stimulating and challenging curriculum. Many times ELLs are not given opportunities where they are given cognitively stimulating curriculum or age appropriate content due to their lack of oral language proficiency.  To achieve higher levels, ELLs should be mainstreamed and not separated into ESL classes. Content and language cannot be separated. “…concepts and knowledge on the one hand, and subject-specific language, literacy, and vocabulary on the other, are interdependent.” (Gibbons, p.10)

            There are two features of Academic Language that make it distinctly different from the everyday face-to-face language that learners are familiar with. One feature is nominalization, which is the process of changing verbs to nouns. For example destroy becomes destruction. Pollute becomes pollution. Extinct becomes extinction, etc. The use of nominalization allows the reader/writer to focus more on key concepts or big ideas, rather than things. A sentence that reads, “When people clear the land for houses and roads they change the environment.” A nominalized sentence would read, “Clearing and development of land often results in the destruction of the natural habitat of many local species.” Nominalization can also mean changing other parts of speech to nouns. For example, “The resources were very scarce so the school closed.” as opposed to, “The scarcity of resources resulted in the closure of the school.” (p.52).

The ability to nominalize does not develop in children until about age 12 or 13 years old. You can see how this difference from the spoken to the written word can trip up ELL’s. Here are a few helpful tips relevant to all students, but most importantly for ELL’s.

·      Go from familiar and concrete to subject specific, unfamiliar and abstract.

·      Use concrete and familiar examples that link students’ personal experiences.

·      Use familiar language to talk about experiences before moving to specialized subject language.

·      Sequence your teaching and learning activities in a way that you move toward specialized language of written texts that you know the student will read, rather than having them read them at the beginning of introducing a concept.

Stay tuned for our next episode where we will take a look at another way academic language is packaged: Nominal Groups.