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ARTICLE IN PRESSINEDU-485; No. of Pages 10

Linguistics and Education xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Linguistics and Education

j ourna l h omepa ge: www.elsev ier .com/ locate / l inged

rom academic language to academic communication:uilding on English learners’ resources

ari Hanedaenn State University, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, College of Education, World Languages Education & Applied Linguistics,hambers 155, University Park, PA 16802, United States

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eywords:nglish learnercademic languageearningcademic communicationociocultural theoryediational means

a b s t r a c t

In the first part of the article, I briefly survey the major theoretical frameworks proposedand empirical approaches adopted in recent research on academic language. While masteryof academic language is certainly important for academic success, this construct does notfully encompass the range of modalities through which students participate in the learningof school subjects. Adopting a sociocultural perspective on learning, I propose that academiccommunication better captures the multi-modal dynamics of learning and teaching as itoccurs in classrooms. Working together in joint activities, such as problem solving, devel-oping ideas, and communicating understanding, involves material action, artifacts, speechand writing, and other semiotic tools such as graphs, diagrams, and images. While Englishlearners benefit from extra linguistic scaffolding, it is particularly important for them toengage in activities that draw on non-linguistic forms of communication to complementthe meanings made by language.

© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

. Introduction

Among factors affecting success of school-aged students, the development and mastery of academic language (AL) isonsidered to be critical (Francis, Rivera, Lesaux, Kieffer, & Rivera, 2006). All students must face this task, but it can bearticularly challenging for English learners (ELs), who are simultaneously learning the language of instruction as wellss the vocabulary and content of the different school subjects. Although AL concerns all school-aged students, it has beeniscussed and researched primarily in relation to the education of second-language students in the fields of TESOL, bilingualducation, and applied linguistics, leading Snow and Uccelli (2009) to call for more research on this topic in the field ofanguage and literacy education for all students. Yet despite a growing interest in and recognition of the importance of thisonstruct, AL lacks an agreed-upon definition, since it has been defined and operationalized in different ways for differenturposes (Anstrom et al., 2010).

Clearly, any discussion of AL and of the related issues of teaching and assessing must begin with a consideration of howL is conceptualized and characterized. For this reason, I will briefly survey the major theoretical frameworks proposednd empirical approaches adopted in recent research on AL. However, the aim of the present article is to argue for themportance of going beyond the current discussion of AL, approaching it from a sociocultural perspective on learning that

Please cite this article in press as: Haneda, M. From academic language to academic communication: Building on Englishlearners’ resources. Linguistics and Education (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2014.01.004

akes EL’s diverse resources and their empowerment into consideration in a more holistic manner. On this basis, I thenropose that the multi-modal dynamics of learning and teaching as it occurs in classrooms is better captured in terms of

academic communication’. I shall then present a set of pedagogical principals based on this sociocultural perspective on

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2 M. Haneda / Linguistics and Education xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

learning, illustrating how they may be put into practice with two examples from elementary classrooms, which included aproportion of ELs.1

2. Academic language and academic communication

2.1. Academic language: what is it?

Although a variety of different conceptualizations have been proposed to define AL at different linguistic levels, fromlexis to discourse organization, and from various theoretical perspectives, from cognitive to sociocultural (Bailey & Huang,2011), here I selectively describe several major approaches, the majority of which address ways to assist in the teaching ofAL (for a comprehensive review of research on AL, see Anstrom et al., 2010).

As early as the 1980s, Cummins (1979) alerted the education community to the importance of distinguishing betweencognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS), and his work has beenparticularly influential in K-12 TESOL and bilingual education in the United States (Valdés, 2004). In brief, BICS, also referredto as conversational (social) language, consists of the language skills that are needed in day-to-day social interaction, and itis considered to develop in a few years. CALP, on the other hand, refers to the linguistic ability to manipulate and interpretlanguage in the kinds of cognitively demanding, contextually reduced texts that are associated with schooling (Cummins,1984); mastery is said to take ELs five to seven years, depending on their previous educational and literacy experiences.

As Cummins (2008) stated, the distinction was intended “to draw educators’ attention to the timelines and challengesthat second language learners encounter as they attempt to catch up to their peers in academic aspects of the schoollanguage” (p. 71). Arguing against the one-dimensional view of language proficiency prevalent at the time, for exampleOller’s (1979) notion of global language proficiency, Cummins (1980, 1984) warned educators of the peril of conflating BICSwith CALP in educational assessment, which, he argued, might be responsible for the large number of ELs being misplacedin special education.

However, his proposed distinction soon met with a variety of criticisms, ranging from the charge that it privileged school-based language over other varieties to the objection that it uncritically posited a linear developmental progression fromBICS to CALP or offered an impoverished view of everyday communication, which, in practice, often requires considerablenegotiatory skill (e.g., Bailey, 2007; MacSwan, 2000; Martin-Jones & Romaine, 1987). Nevertheless, despite such criticisms,the distinction has continued to inform work on AL. For instance, Scarcella (2003) employed this dichotomy on the groundsthat AL is indeed cognitively demanding and must be learned without contextual cues; furthermore, it requires greatermastery of an extensive range of linguistic features than colloquial English. However, Cummins (2000) himself later movedaway from his original formulation, describing the goal for AL as “access to and command of the oral and written academicregisters of schooling” (p. 67).

One of the more recent developments in the literature of AL is a practice-based or bottom-up approach to academicEnglish that has been adopted by a group of researchers at CRESST (National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards,and Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles) (e.g., Bailey, 2007; Bailey & Huang, 2011). This work is orientedtoward language testing with the goal of articulating the level of competence in AL that all school-aged students in theUnites States must achieve in order to function well in content-area classes. CRESST researchers have examined languageuse in mainstream upper-elementary grades from multiple perspectives, including textbooks, content standards (e.g., thoseof the science curriculum), teacher expectations, and classroom teacher-talk (e.g., Bailey, 2007; Bailey, Butler, & Sato, 2007).Bailey and Heritage (2008) break down AL into School Navigational Language (SNL) and Curriculum Content Language (CCL).SNL refers to the language through which students communicate with peers and teachers, including teacher instruction andCCL to “the language used in the process of teaching and learning content materials” (p. 15). These authors contrast sociallanguage, SNL, and CCL according to the purposes for which these language varieties are used, their degree of formality,the contexts of their use, the predominant modalities they utilize, teacher expectations for language abilities across thesevarieties, and grade level expectations (e.g., those set by standards, instructional materials, administrators) (pp. 15–17).This approach is helpful to practitioners in that it provides grade-level indicators for language performance that can beused for instructional and assessment purposes.


Along with this new development, Cummins’s proposal of CALP has been further pursued by educational researcherswho have investigated what they consider to be its essential features, such as its use of academic vocabulary and its differentgrammatical and discourse structures; of these, the most intensively studied has been academic vocabulary (Anstrom

1 A caveat is in order here. I do not claim that this article has provided a comprehensive answer to all the issues related to ELs’ development of academiccommunication. First, my focus is on ELs who are already relatively fluent in conversational English. For beginning English-proficient ELs it is clear thatmore intensive second-language focused instruction is needed than was discussed here. As well, newly arrived adolescent ELs with little or interruptedschooling will also require much more intense linguistic and cultural scaffolding than was assumed here. Another important issue that is not discussedis the promotion of dual language development among ELs. The two examples to be presented are in English-medium instructional settings, and theyshow how committed teachers, who may not be fluent in their ELs’ first languages, can successfully engage them in learning. However, this should not beinterpreted as exclusive support for monolingual pedagogy. There are settings in which bilingual programs are the most appropriate choice, whereas thereare others in which English-medium instruction is the only feasible choice (e.g., with ELs from diverse L1 backgrounds). For the promotion of bi/multilingualdevelopment, I refer readers to the writing of scholars such as Jim Cummins, Ofelia García, and Kenji Hakuta.


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t al., 2010). Underpinning this strand of research is a view of language as a discreet system or structure (e.g., syntax,orphology, lexis, phonology). Snow (2008), one of the prominent scholars in this research, for example, explains that in

rder to engage in secondary science, students need “to understand words that are used to talk and write about science”p. 452). That is to say, students must acquire “sophisticated and abstract vocabulary” including “all purpose academicords” as well as disciplinary specific ones (Snow, 2008, p. 452). Taking the perspective of language acquisition (i.e., aspects

f the acquired language being measurable), research on the teaching of academic vocabulary has generally taken annterventional approach with pre- and post-test design (e.g., Calderón, 2007; Carlo, August, & Snow, 2005; Lesaux, Kieffer,aller, & Kelley, 2010; Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003). In one such study, arguing that one of the most effective waysor students to access sophisticated vocabulary is to learn how words are formed, Kieffer and Lesaux (2012) carried out

study of the effects of vocabulary instruction on the morphological awareness of grade 6 language-minority studentsompared with that of native speakers. The 18-week vocabulary intervention was found to benefit all students; however,he language-minority students showed greater gains than their peers in the development of morphological knowledge.n this basis, they argued for the importance of instruction on morphology because word formation processes are highly

elevant for reading and writing in academic registers.By contrast, educational linguists and researchers who take a functional view of language have developed a very different

pproach to AL on the basis of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1994). SFL investigates language in socialontext, viewing it as a potential for making meaning. Lexical and grammatical choices are made on the basis of the speaker’serception of, and response to, a particular context of situation, and these choices also serve to instantiate that context. Aey construct in SFL is that of ‘register,’ which can be defined as the constellation of lexical and grammatical features thatharacterizes the language used in a particular social context (Halliday & Hassan, 1989). On this basis, SFL linguists havexamined the relationships between a variety of social contexts and the co-occurring linguistic features, including theontexts of formal education. In recent years, SFL linguists have contributed greatly to our understanding of the linguisticeatures of the written academic registers and genres used in different disciplines and school subjects (e.g., Christie &erewianka, 2008; Christie & Martin, 2007; Coffin, 2006; Schleppegrell, 2004). SFL work has been translated into genre-based

iteracy pedagogy across the curriculum in which school-based genres (e.g., recount, narrative, report) are explicitly taughthrough a simultaneous focus on generic structures and linguistic features (see Rose & Martin, 2012 about the specifics of thisedagogy). Through this genre-based literacy, students are introduced to academic registers in a systematic way, includinghe learning of grammatical terminology to unpack complex texts.

Building on and extending SFL work, Gibbons (1998, 2006), a SFL linguist and a TESOL educator in Australia, has drawnttention to the importance for students, particularly ELs, to experience the range of language uses that change accordingo participant configurations and contexts while focusing on the same topic. Drawing on SFL, second-language research,nd classroom discourse studies, Gibbons argues for a model of language that is discourse and text-based rather than onehat focuses on grammar per se, in order to adequately address the range of language modes utilized in the classroom.rawing on her qualitative research with 9–10 year olds in an Australian classroom Gibbons (1998) draws attention to the

ntertextual nature of classroom language used in learning content material. Rather than a binary distinction between socialnd academic language, she points to the importance of conceptualizing the development of AL along the continuum ofode (Halliday, 1994; i.e. from contexts of informal conversation to formal written communication).

.2. From academic language to academic communication

Based on the conceptualizations of AL presented in the previous section, it is evident that all school-aged students aressumed to need to develop AL so that they can achieve academic success in school. When AL is understood to be “theanguage of schooling” (Schleppegrell, 2004), this is a logical interpretation:

Academic language is functional for getting things done at school, varying as it is used in different subjects areas andfor different purposes, but requiring that children use language in new ways to learn and to display knowledge aboutwhat they have learned in ways that will be valued (Schleppegrell, 2012, p. 410).

There is little doubt about the importance of learning school-sanctioned ‘ways with words’ for academic success, since its in large part through schooling that the intellectual and cultural knowledge and values deemed important in a particularociety are transmitted to the next generation. However, what is needed is a more expansive view of learning that givesdequate consideration to students’ lives outside as well as inside school. That is to say, their leaning is not “encapsulated”ithin the school, but it is connected to the outside world in which they live, including their homes, communities, peer

roups, youth clubs, and, increasingly, technology-mediated spaces (e.g., Engeström, 2001; Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005;utièrrez, 2008; Lam, 2009). By contrast, the different conceptualizations of and approaches to AL reviewed in the previousection have a common tendency to treat mastery of AL as an end itself rather than as a means to the achievement of aariety of ends that are not purely linguistic. Even the SFL approach to AL, which purports to empower students by enablinghem to achieve success in school and in their future careers, does not aim for empowerment in the present, for example


y taking social action to improve their current lives. To underscore this actional nature of language use (see van Lier &alqui, 2012) and the more expansive view of learning, I suggest that it is more productive to think in terms of ‘academic

ommunication’ and students’ expanding communicative repertoires as including AL when this is appropriate to the actioneing undertaken.


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The expansive view of learning envisioned here would take account of at least the following three issues. First, advances intechnology have provided multiple tools for humans to make meaning in this new media age. Ways in which students learnin and out of school involve multiple semiotic tools, including what are often referred to as twenty-first century literacies.While research on AL has tended to place an emphasis on written language, the importance of oral language and othersemiotic resources for meaning making (e.g., gesture, graphs, drawings, images) must also be emphasized (Kress, 2003).Second, AL is not only needed in school since the genres that are taught are closely related to those that are requisite forparticipation in civic society, including business, law, and public relations; that is to say, as part of the language of widercommunication (Smitherman, 1973). For this reason, scholars, such as Lisa Delpit and Jim Martin, have argued forcefully forexplicit teaching of what Martin (1993) calls the “language of power” in order to level the playing field for ‘non-mainstream’students. Delpit (1993, p. 125), for example, has suggested that parents from non-dominant communities “want to ensure thatthe school provides their children with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes thatwill allow for success in the larger society.” These scholars thus argue that command of AL is a prerequisite for understandingand using the sorts of language characteristic of formal situations. Third, the learning of AL should take place in contextsin which students attempt to achieve their current and future goals. As they expand their communicative repertoires toinclude AL, they should be encouraged to deploy the full range of semiotic resources that they have accumulated throughtheir varied experiences and life trajectories.

3. Sociocultural perspective on learning and academic communication

In this section, I draw on sociocultural theory to develop the argument for recasting Academic Language in terms ofAcademic Communication. Among the key tenets of sociocultural theory that are particularly relevant for the discussion hereare the following. First, it is through participation in joint productive activities that culturally valued skills and knowledge aretransmitted and improved upon over succeeding generations, as individuals appropriate them and put them to use as theyparticipate in these activities (Tomasello, 1999). Indeed, learning is an inseparable aspect of participation in communitiesof practice, as is the development of personal identity (Lave & Wenger, 1991). It follows, therefore, that learning does notoccur as the result of teacher transmission and student copying and memorizing; rather, it requires the learner to take up,transform, and appropriate those knowledgeable skills that currently prove useful in making sense of and acting on and inthe world he or she inhabits (Leontiev, 1981).

Second, central to this conception of learning is the recognition that almost all activities depend on the use of “medi-ational means.” In Tool and sign in the development of the child, Vygotsky (1999) made a distinction between two kinds ofmediational means: tools, which are found or manufactured artifacts that extend humans’ physical capabilities, and signs,such as language, mathematical symbols, maps and diagrams, which, in a manner similar to the functioning of tools, makepossible the interpersonal communication of meaning and the development of what he called the “higher mental functions.”He posited that children naturally develop “spontaneous concepts” to make sense of the social world in which they live, asthey participate in the activities of their families and communities. Then, through formal instruction in school, they graduallydevelop “scientific concepts,” which are typically more abstract and interrelated in the conceptual systems that underpin thevarious domains of formally developed knowledge (Vygotsky, 1987). While Vygotsky clearly recognized the importance ofmaterial tools, his research and writing focused primarily on semiotic mediation and the role of language in the developmentof conceptual thinking by providing the means for defining concepts and the relationships among them. However, morerecently, scholars (e.g., Kress, 2001, 2003; Lemke, 2002) have emphasized the fundamentally multimodal nature of meaningmaking. Lemke (2002), for example, has noted that science education in school places multimedia literacy demands onstudents. His observation of one student in an advanced chemistry class showed the wide range of semiotic representationsthat this student had to synthesize, including rapid spoken English from his teacher, the writing and layout of informationon an overhead transparency, diagrams, chemical symbols, mathematical formulas in the textbook, and observations of theactions and speech of other students.

Further, in addition to semiotic representations, people in a wide range of occupations also use material tools in theirwork, which complement meanings made linguistically. Consider, for example, a research team in one of the natural sciences.In planning, carrying out and evaluating a series of experiments, they use material objects, such as lab equipment, measuringdevices and data-processing hardware, in conjunction with semiotic tools and artifacts, such as relevant theories and variousmodes of data representation. They also engage in informal conversations with colleagues about their work as well asdiscussing it in more formal meetings; they keep written notes on the progress of their experiments and contribute tothe drafting of articles for publication and reports to their sponsoring agencies. Scientific sense making, therefore, involvesscientists’ constructing and refining their ideas within a community of co-researchers; as they work together, they transformtheir observations into findings through argumentation and persuasion, not simply through measurement and analysis (e.g.,Knorr-Cetina & Mulkay, 1983; Latour, 1987; Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Thus, as Latour and Woolgar (1986) observed, contraryto the logical and coherent process that is described in science textbooks and scientific papers as the Scientific Method, actual


scientific practice involves collaborative creative work, including tool-mediated action, imagination, and scientific reasoning.In other words, success in their work requires the flexible use of a wide range of knowledgeable skills in multiple modalitiesas well as the ability to deploy different ways of using language in order to manage interpersonal relationships in the courseof advancing their shared understanding of the substantive issues that their research addresses.


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Although at a different level of sophistication, the same versatility should be expected to characterize students’ work inchool (see Lee, Quinn, & Valdés, 2013). The varied linguistic, intellectual, and cultural resources that students bring to schoolhould be proactively drawn upon and used as leverage for the development of academic communication, particularly thatf AL. This is where a critical perspective is important. While mastery of AL is vital for academic success, it should not be posi-ioned as the most privileged in relation to the other meaning-making resources at students’ disposal. When AL is given pridef place, the result is the creation of a language hierarchy in which other linguistic and semiotic resources, be they vernac-lar English or languages other than English, are assigned a subordinate status. This can be problematic when one takes theiew that language is interwoven with a person’s culture, values, and sense of identity (e.g., Gutièrrez, 2008; Kramsch, 2010;ewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007). As Kirkland (2010) has argued, paying tribute to linguistic diversity is not sufficient. In classroomractice, it is necessary to recognize, appreciate, and actively incorporate the multiple linguistic and cultural “repertoires ofractice” (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) that students bring into the classroom in order that the learning of AL builds on students’xisting competences and interests, which are closely tied to their lives, communities, and the sociopolitical milieu.

Building on their developing competence in academic communication, students should be encouraged not only to readhe word but also to “read the world” and act upon it; they should be enabled to understand the social practices and relations,nd the institutional and governmental procedures that are made possible and sustained by the literacy practices valuedn mainstream society (Freire & Macedo, 1987). An ultimate goal is for them to be able to critically engage with a civicociety that is heavily text-mediated, fully participating in the larger society and using their academic communication skillsffectively to achieve their own goals. As Kress (2001) has suggested, learning goes beyond the acquisition of the presentedurricular materials to extend across settings as the learner takes up and appropriates ‘what was proposed to be learned’o address her or his own purposes; what become highlighted in this horizontal movement are “the principles of selection,ransformation, and transduction” (i.e., shifts in the modes through which the learner communicates his or her ideas andoncerns) that emerge, arising from the differing interests of the learner (p. 31).

. Creating classroom ecology that promotes the use of academic language

The aim of this section is to consider how the sociocultural perspective on learning described above can be brought toear on the learning and teaching of academic communication in the classroom. With ELs from diverse linguistic and culturalackgrounds particularly in mind, I suggest that the key features of this perspective may be realized through the enactmentf the following pedagogical principles: (a) honoring students’ lived experiences, engaging their interests, and proposingoals for activities that have meaning for them beyond the classroom; (b) creating opportunities for participation in socialractices associated with different school subjects through collaborative joint activities; (c) encouraging students to maketrategic use of the diversity of tools, material and semiotic, at their disposal, including vernacular and academic registerss well as various other modes of meaning-making; and (d) supporting students to take up, transform, and appropriatehe knowledgeable skills involved in joint activities in order to make sense of or act on the world. Taken together, theserinciples can be summed up in the overarching principle of creating a “community of learners” (Brown & Campione, 1994),

n which students’ interests and their existing resources are valued such that they want to invest in learning and in theevelopment of their personal identities. Such a community provides a safe space in which students can explore, express,nd extend their ideas through collaboration with their peers and scaffolding by the teacher. While these principles are notew, it is important to emphasize their particular significance for the learning and teaching of academic communication.

These principles are relevant for all students, but particularly important for ELs, who have varied linguistic, cultural, andife trajectories that do not necessarily overlap with the normative assumptions of school. In other words, they may lack theinguistic and cultural experiences that are taken for granted by teachers, such as routinized behaviors (e.g., how to interact

ith adults) and literacy-related experiences (e.g., familiarity with being read to by adults at home). This type of mismatch inxpected behaviors at school can be detrimental because teachers may misconstrue ELs’ unexpected behaviors as evidence ofheir lack of basic competences. Such a deficit view, arising from mismatched expectations, has been shown to be particularlyetrimental to the academic performance of students from non-dominant communities (e.g., Heath, 1983; Michaels, 1981);o it would not be inappropriate to assume that some ELs may fall prey to similar circumstances as those from non-dominantommunities (Gutièrrez & Orellana, 2006). However, it is important to recognize the difference between these two groupsf students. Non-mainstream students typically have facility with some variety of English, while for ELs English is a newanguage that has to be learned at the same time as they are being socialized into the normative expectations of school inheir host country. It is thus critical for educators to value the rich linguistic and cultural resources that ELs have in theirrst language (Gonzalez et al., 2005), but at the same time to recognize the need for providing extra linguistic scaffoldingGibbons, 2006), drawing on other non-linguistic forms of communication to complement the meanings made by language.

In what follows, using two examples from other scholars’ research, I will illustrate how these principles can work inonjunction with one another; how the specifics of different classroom contexts shape the ways in which they are enactedn practice; and how such pedagogical practices are linked to the learning and teaching of academic communication.


.1. Creating space for co-mingling everyday and scientific registers and sense making

Part of a larger program of research conducted at the Chèche Konnen Center in Massachusetts, my first example is aesign experiment in science jointly undertaken by an experienced classroom teacher and two researchers in a combined


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third-/fourth-grade class in an urban school; out of 21 students, nine were second-language speakers (Roseberry, Ognowski,DiSchino, & Warren, 2010). This particular design experiment (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003) focusedon heat transfer and the particulate nature of matter with the explicit aim of bringing into contact “students’ diversemeaning-making practices and the big ideas and practices of the discipline” (Roseberry et al., 2010, p. 327).

To foster this co-mingling of ideas, a participant structure called “science talk,” nicknamed Sherlock in this class, was usedonce a week throughout the 18-week science unit, each session lasting approximately 45 min. A major purpose of sciencetalk was to disrupt the common pattern of school talk, namely teacher initiation–student response–teacher evaluation(Mehan, 1979). Here, instead of teacher-dominated discourse, students had more control over the range and flow of ideas,“exploring their emerging understandings of the scientific questions or phenomenon under study” (Roseberry et al., 2010,p. 330) with the teacher acting as a facilitator. The focus in this particular unit was on engaging with five big science ideas;Phase 1 dealt with one and Phase 2 with four ideas. Here I report the first phase, which focused on Newton’s Second Law ofThermodynamics (big idea 1): Heat flows from objects at higher temperatures to objects at lower temperatures.

The research team regularly analyzed the recorded weekly Sherlock sessions and, based on their evolving view of thechildren’s understanding, developed appropriate lessons to follow. In the first phase, the children carried out activitiesdesigned to explore their everyday understanding and experience of heat and temperature (e.g., melting ice cubes, wearingcoats in the winter). After being introduced to the Second Law (later hung on the wall as a poster), the teacher asked themto use the Second Law to explain why they wore coats in winter. At this point, only a few were able to make the connection.

However, an unexpected fire drill, which forced them to go outside without their coats in the middle of winter, broughtthe Second Law to life. When they returned to the classroom, students and teacher resumed the conversation. This time,the children were eager to make sense of their fire-drill experiences, and 25 min of animated Sherlock discussion followed.The students began not only to see ‘cold’ in a new light as heat flowing out of their bodies, but also to “see heat as an objectitself, in addition to understanding it as a bodily sensation” (p. 355). Put differently, the Second Law “gave them a way tounderstand how coats work” (p. 335), as observed in their comments: “when you’re outside your jacket keeps you warm-when you zip it all the way up to the top it traps um the warmness in you”; “I think it’s because you- your heat- the heatfrom your body um flows to the cold air and then (.) um if you put a coat on it traps it” (p. 335).

As a result of this experience, the children were enabled to see familiar phenomena in the light of the Second Law,thereby engaging in scientific sense making. Roseberry and her colleagues argued that “the children were, in effect, creatinga transformative space in which boundaries between their lived experience and scientific laws could become coordinatedin new understanding” (p. 337). From a linguistic perspective, what is interesting is the children’s spontaneous use ofscientific concepts after the fire drill. Their progress in scientific sense making became apparent as they started to shift fromdescriptors of everyday sensory experiences (e.g., adjectives –“hot” and “warm” and verbs – “getting hot” and “heating up”)to nominalized states and processes. As Roseberry and her colleagues explain,

They [the children] needed to be able to point to, index, discuss and interrogate it [heat] as a phenomenon. As Hallidayand Martin (1993) noted, that is standard practice in science to transform processes or actions into nouns; for example,refracted becomes refraction and moving becomes motion. The children transformed language in similar ways as theybegan to see heat as an object of investigation in its own right (p. 339).

In addition, the children’s thinking about coats also became affected by their growing understanding of the Second Law;they began to frame causal explanations (e.g., “Because you blood is warm blooded and the warm goes into the coat,” “whenyou go outside you body heat fl- flows out of you but when you put a coat on it acts as a stopper for the body heat and ittraps it”).

While this example embodies all the proposed pedagogical principles in action, particularly salient are: the provisionof a safe discursive space, science talk, in which the students can explore and build on each other’s ideas; the valuing oftheir interests and emerging understandings of the conceptual issue; and the teachers’ planning of activities, which builtupon the students’ interests and their learning potential, enabling them to learn in their zones of proximal development, asVygotsky (1987) described such collaboration. In sum, the Sherlock sessions generated a community of inquirers in this class,as students posed authentic questions and responded to each other’s contributions in order to make sense of the phenomenaunder investigation.

With respect to language use, it is worth pointing out that the shift in the children’s mode of thinking prompted ashift from simple experiential statements to causal explanation, which called for the use of nominalization to refer to thegeneral phenomenon of heat. However, rather than deliberately teaching these language forms, the teachers recognizedthe importance of creating opportunities that naturally led students to use some aspects of AL. Significantly, as Halliday(1988) noted in relation to the historical development of science writing, it was the need for an effective way of sharingnew understandings of scientific phenomena that led to the gradual shaping of the register of scientific communication. Insimilar fashion, the students learned that physical changes that they had observed on many different occasions could bereferred to by a superordinate abstract nominal term, such as ‘heat’ or ‘warmth’.


It might be objected that the teachers in this example were not concerned with the learning and teaching of AL, as such.However, I would argue that by helping the students to explore the significance of their personal experiences in a moresystematic manner, they were preparing the way for more discipline-specific ways of thinking with language in the latergrades.


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.2. Engaging students’ interests and setting real-life goals

The second example, taken from a study reported by Gebhard, Harman, and Seger (2007), illustrates how a more explicitocus on the learning of AL was enacted in a fifth grade language-arts unit. Critical in this example is that the teacher builter lesson on her students’ social worlds and concerns and that the students were enabled to take social action to improvehe quality of their school life by petitioning to the school principal in writing – another form of empowerment.

The study describes how Julia, an 11 year-old girl originally from Puerto Rico, learned to use academic language inhe genre of persuasive writing in Seger’s fifth grade class. Seger, an experienced elementary school teacher, undertook

case study of Julia as part of her participation in a professional development program ‘Access to Critical Content andnglish Language Acquisition’ (ACCELA Alliance) – a federally funded professional development partnership between atate university and two urban school districts in Massachusetts. Recognizing the increasing pressure on teachers causedy mandated standardized testing, the program aimed to help them meet the challenge of devising ways of enabling alltudents, particularly ELs, to make sense of “academic language” in a way that allows retaining “space for reading andriting about issues their students care about” (Gebhard et al., 2007, p. 420).

Seger was concerned about how testing was replacing teaching in her school. This tendency was exacerbated by thechool’s elimination of recess to make more time available for test preparation. To make matters worse, her students hado regular physical education program because the school gym had been damaged in a fire; instead, while the gym wasnder repair, they were often asked “to run up and down a narrow stairwell or play ball in cramped hallways” (p. 423). Segerecognized her students’ frustration and wanted them to be able to communicate it to the school principal. To this end, sheecided to draw on a systemic functional linguistics (SFL) approach – to which she had been introduced in her work withCCELA – to design a unit of study “to teach her students how to analyze and use academic language to get their recess back

hrough a letter-writing campaign to the principal” (p. 423). This unit, therefore, had the functional goal for the students ofaking action to reclaim their recess. At the same time, the teacher’s goals included empowering her students and helpinghem learn the difference between everyday and academic language as well as the kind of AL that they would encounter onigh-stakes tests.

Seger first asked her students to record their thoughts about this topic through writing and pictures; they used “illus-rations, bold letters, and print to show how strongly they felt about the issue” (p. 423). On this occasion, Julia wrote, “. . .e get tired of going up and down the stairs,” students need “to run around skip, and play,” and it “is not fair that students

n [Fuentes] CAN NOT HAVE RECESS !!!!!!!!!!!!” (p. 423). Her multimodal free-write included drawings of angry strikersrotesting with placards containing various messages of direct objection. The students then shared their free-writes and as

class decided on ways of taking action, finally choosing a campaign of writing letters to the school principal. At that point,eger told her students that she would be their advocate but they needed to learn how to present their arguments in anppropriate manner.

In introducing persuasive writing to her students, Seger gave a series of mini-lessons, based on SFL, and showed thetudents “how words, sentence patterns, and organization structures function in academic writing” (p. 424). For instance,he engaged the students in a collaborative letter-writing exercise where she and her students explored ways of writing aetter to a hypothetical restaurant owner to ban smoking. She and her students highlighted the organizational structure ofhis model letter, its use of specific connector words, and specific sentence structures. She also drew her students’ attentiono appropriate linguistic choices to be made for the intended audience, in this case an adult who runs a business. Further, sherovided her students with other textual models – as examples of how expert writers linguistically convey their arguments;hese models were then analyzed through collaboratively undertaken linguistic deconstruction work. The students nextorked on their draft letters and were assisted by the teacher through writing conferences. In her conference, Julia learned

o build her argument more coherently by using more conditional and temporal connectors: “if you want us to learn better,hen give us a break,” and “We will finish our work, while the kindergarteners are getting lunch” (p. 426). While retaininghe strong message of her first free-write, Julia was able to present her case using the conventions and linguistic choicesppropriate for the genre. When the students’ letters were delivered to the principal, he was so impressed by their highuality writing that he reinstated the students’ recess.

Considered in terms of the pedagogical principles (p. xx) in action, particularly noteworthy about this example was thathe unit was rooted in the students’ concerns and that it had a social action-oriented goal that would have immediate impactn their school life. Furthermore, the students were clearly engaged in the task of learning AL, not as an end but as a means ofchieving their goal; thus, as Vygotsky (1978, p. 118) recommended, their writing was “relevant to life.” Other principles weren operation, too. The students were allowed to use tools of their choice in their free-writes, including multiple modalitiesnd everyday registers. They also engaged in collaborative activities in pairs and as a class, discussing ways to take actionnd engaging in linguistic deconstruction and reconstruction of models and of their own texts.

In this example, SFL and genre-based pedagogy were used as mediational tools to promote critical literacy (Comber,hompson & Wells, 2001) in that the students engaged in critical analysis through text deconstruction followed by con-truction of their own text in order to take social action. As Willett, Harman, Lozano, Hogan, and Rubeck (2007, p. 35) argue,


n low-income urban areas “where culturally and linguistically diverse students, particularly ELs, are constructed as at risky state and district assessments within the current climate of high accountability,” taking such social action is particu-

arly powerful in creating student empowerment (also see Gutièrrez, 2008). In this way, students have an opportunity toe-narrate their identities as literate, competent individuals rather than as at-risk-students.


G Model

5. Moving toward the development of academic communication

In the preceding sections, I proposed a set of pedagogical principles derived from a sociocultural perspective on learningand illustrated how they were put into practice in two elementary classroom communities that contained ELs. Naturally, theparticular practices that were described were specific to the school contexts and participants involved. However, I suggestthat the principles themselves are applicable to the learning of academic communication at all levels of schooling.

A key tenet of sociocultural theory is that learning takes place through learners’ appropriation of the knowledge andskills of their communities with the assistance of more expert members (Vygotsky, 1987). This has been confirmed withrespect to early language development by both linguists (Halliday, 1975, 1993; Wells, 2009) and psychologists (Nelson,2007; Tomasello, 1999). Writing about older learners in a variety of communities, Lave and Wenger (1991) and Lave (1996)describe learning in terms of apprenticeship and they propose that this concept can be metaphorically applied to many othertypes of learning through “legitimate peripheral participation.”

Extending these ideas to learning in school suggests that, for students to learn the different school subjects most effec-tively, classrooms need to function as communities of disciplinary practices, in which members “do” history, math, andscience rather than simply “learn about” these subjects (e.g., Cobb & Hodge, 2002; Lee et al., 2013; Levstik & Barton,2010; Nasir, 2002). Earlier, I argued that scientists, for example, construct and refine their ideas within a community ofco-researchers; through collaboration they transform their initial hypotheses and observations into findings through exper-iments, argument and persuasion, creativity, and scientific reasoning (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). I suggest, therefore, thatwhile students may not yet have mastered the knowledge base that underpins the research of specialists in the variousacademic fields, when they have the guidance and support of their teacher and of published resources appropriate to theirlevel of understanding, they are quite capable of adopting similar practices of knowledge creation, as has been demonstratedby a number of educational researchers (e.g. Brown & Campione, 1994; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; Wells, 2001).

Key to success in treating the learning of school subjects in this way is making connections between the topics thatare prescribed by the curriculum and the interests and experiences of students, both in and out of school. To some extent,teachers can draw on what they already know about their students when planning activities but, as illustrated in the twoexamples presented above, it is important to be willing to modify the plan to exploit teachable moments when they occur.Equally important is to deliberately create opportunities for students to voice their responses to ongoing activities by askingquestions, expressing their own ideas and making what they consider to be relevant connections to their own personalexperiences. Not only does this enable the teacher to honor students’ contributions to the co-construction of curricularknowledge, but it also functions as a means of creating and strengthening their sense of being members of a community oflearners and inquirers.

An important aspect of apprenticeship into any discipline is learning to use the mediational means that are necessary forthe various activities involved. In addition to the relevant material technologies, these include a range of linguistic registers,from those of informal discussion with colleagues to those registers of AL that are necessary for accessing the accumulatedknowledge of the discipline and formulating and communicating new information for a wider audience. In professional fields,mastering these necessary knowledgeable skills occurs as an integral part of engaging in the activities in which they areused and is supported by more experienced colleagues. The question, then, is how to achieve the same sort of integration inthe classroom, particularly with respect to the mastering of academic communication, that is to say, a broad communicativerepertoire from which particular selections are made according to the context and goals of the action in progress.

In principle, the answer to this question lies in creating activities that involve students in discipline-relevant modes ofthinking that engage their interest and prompt them to share their ideas with others. The examples above make it clearthat such activities can range from initial exploration of a topic, such as heat transfer, which takes the form of a relativelyinformal discussion, to a purposeful written presentation, such as a reasoned request for action. However, Gibbons (1998),as noted earlier, suggests a more systematic approach, which involves a sequence of activities that call for communicationat different points on a continuum of ‘mode.’ For example, these might include: small group talk while conducting aninquiry (e.g., hands-on experiments) and then discussing results in preparation for making a formal report; making anindividual or group oral report; whole class discussion; individually producing a written report. Clearly, as students movefrom conducting experiments to task-oriented talk and from talk to written report, there is an increase in the formality andideational coherence of the language expected; that is to say, there is an expectation that the oral or written text will drawupon those features of AL that are appropriate for the task in hand. However, it is when students set themselves functionalcommunicative goals that call for the use of a wide range of tools of academic communication that they are most likely toinvest in mastering the necessary vocabulary and organizational structures (also see Enright, 2010).

In such a sequence, it is at the formal end of written communication appropriate to the discipline that the use of AL is mostlikely to be called for. However, even in the less formal contexts of practical activity and oral modes of reporting and engagingin class discussion, the use of some features of AL, when modeled by the teacher, can make for greater clarity in thinkingand communicating and so become part of the community’s repertoire. Reading and talking about subject-relevant textsthat students find interesting, often involving “multimedia genres” (Lemke, 2002), can further enrich their familiarity with


academic communication and provide a bridge into writing their own texts. Practices of this kind, which allow students tomove among the different modalities of action, talk, and text, are helpful for all students, but particularly so for ELs, in givingthem confidence in their ability to contribute to the community’s co-construction of knowledge and to the development oftheir own understanding of the topics they are investigating. Furthermore, from the perspective of second-language learning,


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ngagement in activities across the full range of the ‘mode’ continuum ensures that ELs have exposure to “comprehensiblenput” (Krashen, 1985) and opportunities to produce “comprehensible output” (Swain, 2000), both of which are consideredey to the development of second language. Here, the work by SFL linguists and educational researchers who adopt a SFLpproach can provide valuable insights into ways in which this type of language-focused intervention may be introducednto classroom practices (e.g., Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Rose & Martin, 2012; Schleppegrell, 2004). Finally, it should bemphasized that the learning of academic communication in school, while increasing students’ ability to achieve academicuccess, also provides them with a mediational toolkit that enables them to become active and informed members of theider society to which they belong. Both as students and as citizens, they will need to be able to use a wide range of

nowledgeable skills and to deploy different ways of using language according to the different dimensions of the situationsn which they wish to participate. For these reasons it is essential that they should have access to, and develop command of aroad repertoire of academic communication, including the oral and written modes of AL (Cummins, 2000) in coordinationith skillful use of material and other semiotic tools, through guided practices organized by their teachers.

The argument I have put forward is that AL is best considered as an important component of the broad repertoire ofcademic communication needed for achieving personal, intellectual, and social goals. Rather than treating AL as an end itself,t is more desirable to think in terms of creating the need for students to use a wide range of tools from their communicativeepertoires to achieve meaningful purposes in such a way that they want to engage with classroom tasks and learn relevantL features. The premise is that when students are engaged in activities that concern them, they are motivated to appropriate

he necessary tools in order to take action, both individual and collective. In other words, academic communication needso be treated as a toolkit of mediational means used to achieve goals of personal importance. Once this premise is accepted,he approaches to the teaching of AL reviewed in the first section, be it the development of academic vocabulary or a SFLased linguistic approach to AL, can be used as powerful tools to enhance the learning of academic communication by alltudents, particularly ELs who are in need of additional linguistic scaffolding. To reiterate, the development and mastery ofcademic communication is not an end itself, but an essential component of the socialization process of schooling throughhich students are not only enabled to ‘read the word’ but also to develop the capacity to ‘read the world’ (Freire & Macedo,

987) and to act in it as effective and responsible members of a civic society.

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from academic language to academic communication: building on english learners’ resources

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