TEACHING ACADEMIC LITERACY
For Tristan Reynolds, learning the right kind of academic language is central to student understanding of any subject.
Developing subject-specific language
The fundamental purpose of teaching students language, whether communicative or academic, is to empower them to communicate with others more clearly, cleverly, and confidently. Understanding what language people actually use in specific fields of study is therefore one of the highest-value skills that we can give to students.
As the number of international schools grow, teachers increasingly work with multilingual students who require additional support to develop their academic use of English across the whole curriculum. This means that they need specific practice with the types of language chunks that appear in specific academic disciplines–historians don’t speak or write like chemists, and poets use an entirely different idiom altogether. For students to achieve academically in these disparate fields, they need specific language training for each discipline.
Identifying key academic language
Identifying and prioritizing key discipline-specific language can present issues. While some national and international curricula identify particular concepts and vocabulary for students to learn, these items aren’t always embedded in useful chunks of language. Individual wordlists, complied by teachers or schools may be idiosyncratic and may miss word groupings now being commonly used in school textbooks, research papers and websites.
However, borrowing some tools from computational linguistics can help educators prioritize the most important chunks of language their students will need by identifying the most frequently-used collocations, phrases, or even sentence structures in a discipline. Teachers, school leaders, and school systems can draw on relevant bodies or corpora of language to help them develop students’ use of academic English.