Academic English

9 Key excerpts on "Academic English"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Learning English

  • Neil Mercer, Joan Swann, Barbara Mayor, Neil Mercer, Joan Swann, Barbara Mayor(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 Academic writing in English

  Ann Hewings, Theresa Lillis and Barbara Mayor

  7.1 Introdution

  In this chapter we look at English as an academic language as it is used by lecturers, students and researchers in higher education in many parts of the world. Our main focus will be on academic writing, rather than speech, since this has been more extensively studied. The main questions that we address are:

  • What is ‘academic’ English and how is its nature related to its functions?
  • How does academic writing vary across disciplines?
  • To what extent does academic writing vary across cultures and education systems across the world?
  • How do students acquire academic literacy, and what does it mean to them to write in an ‘academic’ way?

  7.2 English in the academic world

  The use of English as an international academic language, among researchers as well as in teaching activities, has increased dramatically in recent years. In many parts of the former British Empire – in many African countries, India and Singapore, for instance – English has long been established as a medium of university education. Although in postcolonial times there have been some powerful political campaigns to encourage the greater use of other languages in academic settings (such as the pro-Mandarin campaign in Singapore in the 1980s, described in Pennycook, 1994b), many such countries continue to use English in their higher education systems. In Malaysia, the language of tertiary education has continued to be highly contested, with the teaching of some disciplines having moved from English to Malay and back again within the space of a decade. Such a trend is not limited to former colonial territories, however. In 1994 the government of the Netherlands seriously considered a proposal that all Dutch higher education should in future be conducted in English – although this particular proposal was rejected, many individual university courses across Europe are now offered in English.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Academic Language! Academic Literacy!

  A Guide for K–12 Educators

  • Eli R. Johnson(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Corwin

    (Publisher)

  Gaps in language lead to larger gaps in literacy and learning, and gaps in literacy and learning lead to gaps in achievement. When students fail to fix gaps in their language and learning, these gaps often widen and become chasms where students eventually drop out and are academically lost. Most important, our students need to develop academic language and literacy skills so that they can participate effectively in content-area classrooms, in our democratic society, and in the global economy. The lack of academic language has created a dire situation for so many of our students who come from poverty. Elmore (see Crow, 2008) notes that the achievement gap finds at its core a language gap: “In Boston, we’ve got about 40% of the population who … don’t have the academic vocabulary needed to do the work” (p. 46). Directly stated, the language gap leads to a literacy gap, while the literacy gap leads to a gap in academic achievement. As the conditions grow more desperate, students need a systematic and strategic plan to directly increase their academic language and literacy, or many of them will be lost. Needless to say, American education will only realize its tremendous potential when we put language and literacy in their proper place within every classroom. If our students never get a grip on the academic language and literacy of the classroom, they will lose their grip on their educational opportunities and may never seem to hold onto life’s opportunities.

  TWO CATEGORIES OF ACADEMIC LANGUAGE

  Most important, understanding the language of learning at school is the beginning of building an academic foundation and framework for achievement. Overall, academic language includes two primary categories, which are critical for succeeding in school: specific content language and general academic language. The first category covers the particular terminology of a specific subject matter. Specific content language includes the specialized terms that are unique to math, science, language arts, and social studies, or those used within other school subjects. The second category of language covers the general academic language that cuts across all of the content areas at school. General academic language is commonly referred to as academic language.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Promoting Academic Achievement Among English Learners

  A Guide to the Research

  • Claude Goldenberg, Rhoda Coleman(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Corwin

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 , “Academic Instruction in a Second Language,” for more on academic language in the context of instruction in academic content areas.)

  What this means for teachers is that they must be mindful that academic language is distinct in important respects from conversational language and tends to make different cognitive demands on listeners and speakers. Academic language is what is used in textbooks, lectures, and discussions about academic content. The language is more abstract, deals with concepts (e.g., multiplication, democracy, organisms) rather than more immediate or concrete topics, and tends to be more complex than conversational language. Readers and listeners must understand it, often with minimal context, when reading a book or listening to someone deliver a lecture.

  It is possible, however, to overdraw the distinction between conversational and academic language and make it too categorical (Baker, 2006; Valdés, 2004). As with all generalizations, we must be cautious because there are exceptions. Some conversations can be cognitively challenging and require information that not everyone has. Moreover, there are plenty of examples of situations where the language appears to be a hybrid on the “conversational-academic continuum” rather than neatly falling into either the conversational or academic category. For example, talking about a movie’s theme, setting, or the motivations of its central characters, or describing the strategy behind intentionally walking a batter in baseball can take place in informal conversational contexts but requires the use of relatively more abstract, decontexualized language. Table 4.1 compares conversational and academic language, and a hybrid of the two, along several dimensions of language features and use. The critical point for teachers to keep in mind is that they cannot

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners

  A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts

  • Jim Cummins(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  et al. (2015b) point to the gap that may exist, for all learners, between the colloquial language of the home and community and the academic language of schooling. Young learners are successfully enculturated into the language of face-to-face communication within their communities; however, these colloquial conversations and interactions through social media are not always aligned with language and literacy practices characteristic of school such as the language of argumentation and written informational discourse:

  As a consequence, many colloquially fluent students may not have been granted sufficient opportunities to be socialized into academic-language and literacy practices either at home or at school. … The available ethnographic and quantitative research findings point to students from minoritized linguistic communities and from high-needs environments as particularly likely to experience a larger distance between the ways language is used outside of school and the ways it is used in school texts. (Uccelli et al., 2015b: 339)

  Barr et al. (2019) are careful to point out that academic language development is just one of many dimensions of language proficiency that develop through adolescence. It is part of the much larger process of achieving what they term ‘rhetorical flexibility’, understood as the ability to use ‘an increasing repertoire of lexico-grammatical and discourse resources appropriately and flexibly in an expanding variety of social contexts, for instance, mastering the language skills of youth conversation, sportscasts, or religious communities’ (2019: 986). However, core academic language skills reflect the discourse patterns and challenges of language and literacy use within the social context of schooling to a greater extent than other registers of language development.

  The seven domains of CALS were identified either on the basis of existing empirical evidence related to their role in text comprehension or on the basis of persuasive arguments in the scholarly literature related to their relevance to text comprehension. These domains, as operationalised in the Core Academic Language Skills–Inventory (CALS-I), are summarised below (Barr et al.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Misteaching Of Academic Discourses

  The Politics Of Language In The Classroom

  • Lilia I Bartolome(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is useful to dissect the concept of linguistically contextualized language (or “de-contextualized language,” as it is more commonly referred to in the literature) to understand that its high value in part reflects the dominant culture’s preference for structuring and contextualizing language in ways that minimize the interlocutors’ joint creation and negotiation of meaning. In academic settings, high value is placed on producing text that is linguistically contextualized, thus reducing the importance of and need for human interaction and negotiation of meaning, especially when the interlocutors come from different class and ethnic groups.

  Linguistically contextualized language therefore becomes a kind of lingua franca in academic domains. Certainly, the ability to contextualize language by relying chiefly on textual features, especially in academic domains where individuals are expected to communicate with distant and unknown audiences, is a desired one. A set of agreed-upon contextualizing conventions becomes necessary for successful communication to take place. Ana María Rodino accurately described the types of skills and conceptions of language that students must possess in order to produce this academic lingua franca:

  Being removed from the face-to-face setting, and assuming no prior knowledge on the part of unsupportive interlocutors, [linguistically] contextualized language requires anticipating recipient’s needs/expectation; filling in background information; assessing message effectiveness on-line; self-monitoring and self-repair; careful planning to achieve a coherent whole; using precise lexical reference; controlling the complex syntax necessary to make explicit all relationships between ideas, and to sustain lexicalized cohesion across the whole text.29

  It is important to recognize the value of this lingua franca in formal academic settings. However, I argue that instead of imbuing linguistically contextualized language with almost magical properties and denigrating students from cultural and social groups that generally do not rely on these types of contextualizing cues, it is important for educators of linguistic-minority students to clearly comprehend the sociopolitical dimensions of language and literacy teaching. By doing so, these educators can resist viewing the dominant groups’ uses of language as inherently superior and desirable, and they can begin to identify ways for helping linguistic-minority students in the critical appropriation of academic discourses.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes

  • Ken Hyland, Philip Shaw(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Undergraduates in a secondlanguage: Challenges and complexities of academic literacydevelopment . NewYork: LawrenceErlbaum.
• Lillis,T. &Scott,M. (2007) Defining academicliteracies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology, andstrategy. Journal of AppliedLinguistics . 4( 1).5–32.
• Macbeth,K. (2010) Deliberate falseprovisions: The use and usefulness of models in learningacademic writing. Journal of SecondLanguage Writing . 19.33–48.
• Mauranen,A. ,Hynninen,N. &Ranta,E. (2010) English as an academiclingua franca: The ELFA project.English for Specific Purposes .29( 3).151–220.
• Melles,G. ,Miller,G.,Morton,J. &Fegan,S. (2005) Credit-based disciplinespecific English for academic purposes programs in highereducation. Arts & Humanities inHigher Education . 4(3).283–303.
• Moore,T. &Morton,J. (2005) Dimensions of difference:A comparison of university writing and IELTSwriting. Journal of English forAcademic Purposes . 4(1).43–66.
• Morgan,B. (2009a) Revitilising the essay inan English for academic purposes course: criticalengagement, multiliteracies and theinternet. International Journal ofBilingual Education and Bilingualism .12( 3).309–324.
• Morgan,B. (2009b) Fostering transformativepractitioners for critical EAP: Possibilities andchallenges. Journal of English forAcademic Purposes . 8(3).86–99.
• Nesi,H. &Gardner,S. (2012) Genres across the disciplines:Student writing in higher education .Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
• Paré,A. (2014) Rhetorical genre theoryand academic literacy. Journal ofAcademic Language and Learning . 8(1).83–94.
• Pennycook,A. (1997) Vulgar pragmatism,critical pragmatism, and EAP.English for Specific Purposes .16( 4).253–269.
• Price,S. (2014) Student writing in law:Fixed discourse boundaries and hospitablecrossings. Law TextCulture . 17.145–164.
• Prior,P. &Bilbro,R. (2012) Academic enculturation:Developing literate practices and disciplinaryidentities. InCastelló,M. &Donahue,C. (eds).University writing: Selves and texts in academicsocieties (Studies in Writing 24) .Emerald Group PublishingLimited.
• Sarangi,S. &Roberts,C. (1999) Talk, work and institutionalorder: Discourse in medical, mediation and managementsettings