Building Academic Language

Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines, Grades 5-12

Jeff Zwiers

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118744802
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

"Of the over one hundred new publications on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), this one truly stands out! In the second edition of Building Academic Language, Jeff Zwiers presents a much-needed, comprehensive roadmap to cultivating academic language development across all disciplines, this time placing the rigor and challenges of the CCSS front and center. A must-have resource!"
—Andrea Honigsfeld, EdD, Molloy College

"Language is critical to the development of content learning as students delve more deeply into specific disciplines. When students possess strong academic language, they are better able to critically analyze and synthesize complex ideas and abstract concepts. In this second edition of Building Academic Language, Jeff Zwiers successfully builds the connections between the Common Core State Standards and academic language. This is the 'go to' resource for content teachers as they transition to the expectations for college and career readiness."
—Katherine S. McKnight, PhD, National Louis University

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by most of the United States, students need help developing their understanding and use of language within the academic context. This is crucially important throughout middle school and high school, as the subjects discussed and concepts taught require a firm grasp of language in order to understand the greater complexity of the subject matter. Building Academic Language shows teachers what they can do to help their students grasp language principles and develop the language skills they'll need to reach their highest levels of academic achievement.

The Second Edition of Building Academic Language includes new strategies for addressing specific Common Core standards and also provides answers to the most important questions across various content areas, including:

• What is academic language and how does it differ by content area?
• How can language-building activities support content understanding for students?
• How can teachers assist students in using language more effectively, especially in the academic context?
• How can academic language usage be modeled routinely in the classroom?
• How can lesson planning and assessment support academic language development?

An essential resource for teaching all students, this book explains what every teacher needs to know about language for supporting reading, writing, and academic learning.

Chapter 1
Understanding How Students Use Language

The words are just the tip of the iceberg.

We need language to do just about everything, especially school work. School language, often called academic language, may be the most complicated tool set in the world to learn how to use. Many students learn enough to get by, but too many don't. Millions of bright and capable students around the world struggle in school and even give up because they lack the abilities to use language in ways that are expected in academic settings.

Many of the students in the United States who perform poorly in school have been raised speaking, reading, and writing a non-English language or a variation of English that differs from the language that mainstream teachers and curricula use (Ovando & Collier, 1998). Most of these learners were not immersed from birth in the types of English that are valued by schools, teachers, texts, and tests. Nonmainstream students have not had the same conversations or literacy experiences (including books and movies) that their mainstream middle-class peers have had. They have not been exposed to hundreds of books or play with as many educational toys, computer programs, and English-proficient older siblings. Moreover, most of the diverse students who do perform well have been immersed in academic literacy and school-like conversations in their home and community settings, which have primed them to transfer their skills into school English.

Unfortunately, most schools have made little progress in narrowing the overall academic gaps between speakers of nonmainstream versions of English and their peers who were raised speaking more school-aligned varieties of English (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). Many middle and high school teachers have seen the gap continue to widen between students' communication skills and the language required for the many tasks that students encounter in school. These gaps might even increase in light of the robust language demands of the Common Core State Standards and other new standards.

To complicate matters, we might not identify large numbers of students with language-based academic issues: they have little or no accent, they turn in homework, they are well behaved, and they try hard. Yet they fall further behind each year, often just getting by, as they play the game of school. Contrary to what too many people consider to be common sense, simple equal treatment and basic immersion are not enough for many students who are significantly below grade level. They do not just naturally pick up academic language as easily as they pick up other types of social language (Scarcella, 2003).

In the United States, the narrow range of accents, vocabulary, and grammar typically valued by those in power (politicians, business leaders, media, and so on) is often called standard English (Gollnik & Chinn, 2002). Because this is also the type of language that most mainstream members of society speak, it is often called mainstream English. A mainstream student (in this book) is a student who has been raised speaking the dominant dialect (mainstream English, in the United States) by educated middle- or upper-class parents who have provided books, computers, academic support, and rich conversations. Mainstream students typically belong to dominant classes whose members control most of a society's economic and social institutions, including schools. By contrast, nonmainstream students in the United States, such as English learners, children of English learners, speakers of African American vernacular English (AAVE), and children from poor families, have often grown up with less academic support, fewer educational materials, and fewer school-like conversations.

The Role of Home and Community

Students bring with them to school a wide range of social experiences, cultural practices, ways of thinking, and communication styles. These form powerful yet hard-to-see foundations for their learning. Diverse students are often raised learning and thinking in ways that tend to differ from the ways valued by mainstream teachers, school cultures, and test makers. Most teachers learn about these differences in preservice teacher training, but we often fail to consistently apply this knowledge when we teach and assess during full-time teaching. For this reason, this chapter briefly introduces (1) some of the significant mismatches between home and classroom, (2) how to help diverse students add on ways of thinking and communicating that will help them succeed academically, and (3) some major curricular and assessment changes that can more effectively educate diverse students.

For many diverse students, school is a large set of very new situations, with new things to learn and new ways to talk and think—and it can be overwhelming for them. As James Gee (1996) states, “It is just that only a narrow range of these culturally specific home-based skills are rewarded in school, namely those most often found in mainstream homes” (p. 24). For example, certain home-based language practices, such as storybook reading and parental questioning at the dinner table, correlate strongly with academic success (Cook-Gumperz, 1986; Wells, 1986).

When a student enters school, linguistic and conceptual mismatches can have a negative effect on learning. When a mismatch occurs, the student struggles to learn new rules of talk and literacy because these rules are implied—even invisible. That is, we teachers often take them for granted because we assume common knowledge and procedures among learners (Edwards & Mercer, 1993). It makes sense that the more school-like the tasks and communication are at home, the better students are likely to perform at school. Likewise, the more teacher-like the language of a student is, the more the student will meet our expectations and be considered successful.

In her famous ethnolinguistic study, Shirley Brice Heath (1983) found that the middle-class mainstream students had been socialized from a very young age to use many of the language patterns found in school, such as answering questions to which the speaker knows the answer, reciting facts not connected with the immediate context, and ritualizing the uses of language. Heath also pointed out that each classroom activity had its own organization and set of rules. Lesson formats, teacher-student conversations, and other learning tasks formed a classroom culture that influenced language and learning. She concluded that a significant link existed between the narrative, literacy, and communication traditions of home and those needed in school.

In another important study, Susan Philips (1972) examined the classroom language of Native American children in Warm Springs, Oregon. Teachers initially reported that children lacked appropriate language and interaction skills in the classroom and perceived these students to be overly silent and uncooperative. Philips found that the children perceived themselves to be in situations that were inappropriate for speaking. Later, when teachers understood this cultural pattern and created learning situations that more closely resembled oral participation contexts in the Native American community, student involvement increased (Philips, 1983).

And in a study on reading and text discussion behaviors of mothers with children, Williams (1999) found that the types of interactions differed greatly, despite comparable amounts of time spent reading with children and similar rates of demands for information from children. The higher-social-class group of mothers more frequently asked children to elaborate on parts of the book, connect it to their own experiences, provide explanations, evaluate the story as a text, and respond to “Do you think …?” questions. During these interactions, the mothers apprenticed their children in the skill of attending to certain kinds of meaning. Not surprisingly, these types of interactions in the higher-social-class pairs strongly resemble those found in literacy activities and assessment practices at school.

These studies help us to reflect on the powerful influence that students' oral and literacy experiences outside school have on their learning in school. We need to reflect on how student backgrounds align with how we teach, what we teach, how we use language, and how we expect students to describe their learning.

Diversity of Students

Now let's zoom in on several students who experience the disconnect between background and school. These students (the names are pseudonyms) still struggle with school's differing language demands, ways of organizing and interpreting knowledge, classroom and homework expectations, and grading and feedback practices. You will likely see many similarities between the students described next and those in your own classes:

• Sara is a seventh grader who immigrated to the United States four years ago from Mexico. She had missed one year of schooling in Mexico before coming to the United States. Her family came from rural Mexico, where school days were much shorter and often canceled when it rained heavily. Few books were available at school or at home. She still scores as an intermediate English user on the state English proficiency test. She is now in mainstream English, science, and history classes with other English learners. She is a hard worker but lacks confidence in her abilities to read, write, and speak in groups. She asks very few questions even when she does not understand the assignment.
• Armando, a ninth grader who was born in the United States, doesn't like school and is easily distracted by other students. He speaks Spanish at home and in the community. His social English is fluent, but his academic English is weak, according to his teachers. The work that he does in class is just enough to receive some credit. He is not in any support classes, but teachers often say that he needs extra help, especially with his writing and test taking. He doesn't like to read or write and always prefers that the teacher read the text to him. He complains that he is not interested in any of the topics that are taught in his classes.
• Kim came from Vietnam two years ago. She is a very shy and highly motivated fifth grader. who hovers around intermediate levels in reading and writing subtests and lower on oral tasks. Her oral language has errors, but she can make herself understood in most situations. She transitioned from the beginning-English-language development program the previous semester, so this is her first exposure to mainstream classes and culture. The first year, she copied much of her written work directly from the writings of classmates. As she understood more, she took more chances with English. She had a strong academic background in Vietnam and thus comprehended many of the basic ideas being presented in her classes. Reading nonfiction was the biggest challenge for her, particularly the history textbook and the articles assigned in her language arts class.
• David is an African American eighth grader who tends to speak AAVE in most interactions. His parents, who did not go to college, work hard, and they want David to do well in school. He likes school, but does not like to use mainstream English in front of peers in his classes. He does most ...