Building Academic Language E-Book

Jeff Zwiers

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 517

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

“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.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface to the Second Edition

Chapter 1: Understanding How Students Use Language

The Role of Home and Community

Diversity of Students

Capitals, Registers, and Expectations

The Need to Value and Challenge

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 2: Language Skills Required by the Common Core State Standards

A Brief History of Academic Language Proficiency

Functions of Academic Language

Features of Academic Language

Features of Academic Grammar

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 3: Cultivating Academic Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition Basics

Building Habits of Connection

Building Habits of Communication

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 4: Content-Area Variations of Academic Language

Language of Language Arts

Language of History

Language of Science

Language of Math

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 5: Facilitating Whole-Class Discussions for Content and Language Development

Challenges and Benefits of Cultivating Rich Classroom Talk

Asking Questions

Crafting Whole-Class Discussions

Using Activities to Improve Discussions

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 6: Academic Listening and Speaking in Small Groups and Pairs

Challenges of Using Groups

Forms of Group Discussion

Process Over Product: Thinking Together

Designing and Supporting Academic Groups

Language for Working in Groups

Techniques for Reporting Out

Group Activities

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 7: Language for Reading Complex Texts

Benefits of Academic Reading

Key Comprehension Strategies for Academic Reading

Oral Scaffolds for Academic Reading

Text Discussion Activities

Activities for Understanding Text Organization

Reading Activities That Build Academic Grammar

Vocabulary Instruction

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 8: Language for Creating Complex Texts

The Influence of Oral Language

The Influence of Reading

Writing Expository Genres

Scaffolding Academic Writing

A Closer Look: Writing Argument Essays

Informal Writing Activities

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 9: Building Language Development into Lessons and Assessments

Lesson Planning

Academic Language in Summative Assessments

Formative Assessment of Academic Language

Conclusion

Chapter Reflections

References

Chapter 10: Concluding Thoughts

Building Frameworks and Filling in Gaps

Teaching the Tools of the Trade

Conclusion

Appendix A Recommended Resources on Academic Language

Appendix B Frequently Used Academic Words

Appendix C Suggestions for Before, During, and After Minilectures

About the Author

About the International Reading Association

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Table 3.1

Table 3.2

Table 4.1

Table 4.2

Table 4.3

Table 4.4

Table 4.5

Table 4.6

Table 4.7

Table 4.8

Table 4.9

Table 4.10

Table 4.11

Table 4.12

Table 5.1

Table 5.2

Table 5.3

Table 6.1

Table 6.2

Table 6.3

Table 7.1

Table 7.2

Table 7.3

Table 7.4

Table 7.5

Table 8.1

Table 8.2

Table 9.1

Table 9.2

Table 9.3

Table 9.4

Table 9.5

Table 9.6

Table 9.7

List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1

Figure 3.1

Figure 5.1

Figure 6.1

Figure 6.2

Figure 6.3

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3

Figure 7.4

Figure 8.1

Figure 8.2

Figure 8.3

Figure 9.1

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Chapter 1

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Building Academic Language

Meeting Common Core Standards Across Disciplines, Grades 5–12

Second Edition

Jeff Zwiers

Cover design by Adrian Morgan

Cover photograph © Vjom | Thinkstock

Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zwiers, Jeff.

Building academic language: meeting common core standards across disciplines, grades 5–12/Jeff Zwiers.—Second edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-74485-7 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-118-74481-9 (ebk.)

ISBN 978-1-118-74480-2 (ebk.)

1. Academic language—Study and teaching. I. Title.

P120.A24.Z85 2014

407.1—dc23

2013044987

Preface to the Second Edition

The need to develop students' academic language abilities has become more urgent in light of the new standards. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), in particular, require students to use language in more sophisticated ways: arguing, evaluating evidence, analyzing complex texts, and engaging in academic discussions. Many of these language demands are also found in the Next Generation Science Standards and various sets of English Language Development standards. So while this book emphasizes the Common Core, I often use the term new standards throughout the chapters. The first edition of this book provided a general overview of academic language development; this second edition zooms in on more specific standards and ways to build language for meeting them.

As students leave the primary grades, their academic success depends more and more on their abilities to use academic language—the language used to describe abstract concepts, complex ideas, and critical thinking. A common misconception of academic language is that it is just a long list of key content words, such as covalent, meritocracy, reciprocal, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia. Yet content vocabulary—knowing the big words—is just one dimension of academic language. Students must also develop skills with the many “smaller words” and grammatical conventions that make the big words stick together to make meaning. This book therefore emphasizes the terms and tactics that tend to slip under our content vocabulary radar but are vital for describing the abstract concepts, higher-order thinking processes, and complex relationships in each discipline.

Academic language is often cited as one of the key factors affecting the achievement gap that exists between high- and low-performing groups of students in our schools (Wong Fillmore, 2004). And whether performance is measured by large tests or informal observations, many students perform poorly because they cannot meet the linguistic demands of different disciplines. This is especially visible in upper-elementary and secondary classes. As students move out of the primary grades, they enter not only new classrooms but also new ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating.

Students who underperform often have backgrounds that have not primed them for mainstream schooling's ways of learning, speaking, reading, and thinking. You can probably picture several (perhaps several dozen) of these students right now. They are immigrants, great-grandchildren of immigrants, speakers of nonmainstream dialects, special education students, and others who have not been immersed in the academic thought and talk that is valued in school. As a result, their performances are not valued when they take tests, as they read and write, or as they participate in class discussions. These students need more than tutoring sessions, new software programs, special classes, extra visuals, and test preparation programs. They need rich classroom experiences that accelerate the language that supports their content knowledge, thinking skills, communication skills, and literacy skills. Students need curricula and teaching that connect to their cultural and cognitive roots, and they need accelerated learning because their high-performing peers do not linger around, waiting for them to catch up.

This book looks at general types of academic language used across subject areas, as well as the variations of language used specifically in science, math, history, and language arts. It also offers suggestions for making content classrooms more conducive to building students' language and thinking abilities to meet the Common Core and other new standards. The suggestions and activities are meant to be woven into and added to current teaching and assessment practices.

My own teaching experiences inspired me to write this book. In each of the elementary, middle school, high school, and even university courses that I have taught, my students have struggled with the language of academic reading, writing, and discussion. I realized that I was not doing enough to build their academic language abilities. I researched what other teachers were doing to apprentice students into different communities of practice (science, math, history, language arts) through language use. My ongoing work with elementary and secondary teachers has also influenced the content of this book. I work with a variety of content teachers to come up with effective support for their many diverse learners. I coach and engage in action research with many teachers who are focused on developing the language of the new standards. Most of the work centers on the literacy and discourse standards of the Common Core State Standards.

Academic language was also the focus of my doctoral research, a six-month case study in which I recorded and analyzed language use in middle school content-area classes three times a week. My main question was, How do teachers develop the language that students need for success in different content classes? I concluded that academic language is (1) intricately linked to higher-order thinking processes, (2) developed by extensive modeling and scaffolding of classroom talk, and (3) accelerated by weaving direct teaching of its features while teaching content concepts. I also concluded that academic language and its teaching are much more complex and important than most educators realize (Zwiers, 2005).

Many of the classroom dialogue excerpts in this book come from my study, conducted in classrooms in which more than half the students in each class came from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Many students spoke other languages at home (most often Spanish) and African American vernacular English. I have continued to observe similarly diverse upper-elementary, middle, and high school content classrooms. In every class, I see students struggle to use language in ways desired by teachers and the new standards, especially on assessments. But I also notice that as students enter upper grades and secondary school, their teachers typically focus less on language development and more on content learning. The results of my research aligned with the findings of other scholars who argue that teachers need more practical awareness of the language that is what I call the lifeblood of learning in all classes (Fillmore & Snow, 2002; Valdés, Bunch, Snow, Lee, & Matos, 2005).

In addition, teachers around the world tell me about the scores of minority-language speakers who fail in school because they lack the valued skills of school literacy and language use. For example, in Mexico students lack academic Spanish, in China they lack academic Mandarin, and in Egypt they lack academic Arabic.

A challenging set of questions has emerged in my ongoing work with teachers and in my own classroom teaching. These questions have helped shape and organize this book:

What is academic language, and how can I build it as I teach content?

How can I adapt my curriculum and assessment to build on my students' cultural and linguistic strengths?

How can I get students to think together to coconstruct meaning rather than just study to memorize?

How can I build language skills for complex reading and writing?

How can I assess thinking skills and language proficiency in useful ways?

How can I most effectively apprentice students into thinking and talking like experts in my discipline?

In my discussions with teachers about these questions, I realized that a practical guide might be useful, particularly for teachers in grades 5 through 12 who do not have time to sift through more theoretical (and, ironically, more academic) books on the topic. I drew from research in the areas of language development, language acquisition, and cognitive psychology. I looked closely at work by scholars of school language, such as Courtney Cazden, Alan Luke, Robin Scarcella, Susana Dutro, Deborah Short, Gordon Wells, Neil Mercer, Shirley Brice-Heath, James Gee, Lisa Delpit, Mary Schleppegrell, Victoria Purcell-Gates, Lev Vygotsky, Guadalupe Valdés, and Lily Wong Fillmore. I then included research-based teaching activities that would be of interest to preservice teachers, content-area teachers who work with diverse populations, English language development teachers, bilingual teachers, special education teachers, teacher trainers, and others who wish to improve the ways in which we help students add the languages valued in school.

To do this, I argue that all teachers should become what I call practical educational linguists. We must know about the basic inner workings of language in our discipline and put this knowledge into practice in our classrooms. Before looking at the surface features of academic language, we need to understand its roots. Chapter 1 therefore introduces foundational social and cultural perspectives of languages used in and out of school.

Chapter 2 clarifies the functions and features of academic language, including academic grammar, which is the set of rules and conventions that organize words and phrases in school. Science, math, and history teachers should also teach some grammar, given that each discipline emphasizes different ways of thinking that require different grammatical conventions. When students learn these conventions, they gain access to the codes (or blueprints) that accelerate their comprehension and writing abilities. And as an intentional bonus, students learn and understand more content in the process.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of language acquisition, along with key teacher habits and strategies for modeling and scaffolding academic language. And because we teachers are not perfect communicators, this chapter also helps us improve our own language use in classroom settings. Chapter 4 then describes variations of language that correspond to the main content areas taught in schools: math, language arts, history, and science.

The latter half of the book is about designing classroom experiences and assessments to help students reach sustainable and growing levels of academic language use. (Most classroom activities are marked with a symbol for easy reference.) Chapter 5 offers strategies for developing students' academic speaking and listening in whole-class settings. Chapter 6 focuses on ways to adapt and fortify commonly used group and pair activities strategies for academic language development. Chapter 7 looks at the language of reading, emphasizing the development of language to help in comprehending difficult texts. It also includes a section on teaching content-area vocabulary. Chapter 8 provides ways to develop language for academic writing. Chapter 9 introduces ways to assess academic language and plan for instruction based on what we see in assessments. It emphasizes that before we leap into instruction, we must identify the thinking skills, concepts, and language that we want students to learn. Chapter 10 offers some final thoughts and next steps for weaving the ideas in this book into daily practice. The appendixes provide helpful references, examples of academic words, and suggestions for lesson design.

References

Fillmore, L., & Snow, C. (2002). What teachers need to know about language. In C. A. Adger, C. E. Snow, & D. Christian (Eds.),

What teachers need to know about language

(pp. 7–54). McHenry, IL, and Washington, DC: Delta Systems and Center for Applied Linguistics.

Valdés, G., Bunch, G., Snow, C., Lee, C., & Matos, L. (2005). Enhancing the development of students' language(s). In L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.),

Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do

(pp. 126–168). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Wong Fillmore, L. (2004).

The role of language in academic development.

Keynote address given at Closing the Achievement Gap for EL Students conference, Sonoma, CA.

Zwiers, J. (2005).

Developing academic language in middle school English learners: Practices and perspectives in mainstream classrooms.

Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of San Francisco.

Chapter 1Understanding 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 of his homework and often uses social and informal language in his written responses. Teachers call attention to these uses, but he usually has acceptable organization in his writing and scores well. In conversations with teachers, David uses more mainstream expressions and grammar. He knows there is a difference but does not want “to sound so white,” as he says, in front of his friends.

Lisa, a sixth grader, comes from a mixed European American and Filipino middle-class background. This is her third school in four years because her family has moved several times. She was recently tested for special education services. Teachers often recommend her for extra tutoring and for special conditions when tested. When she reads aloud, she pauses often and misreads unfamiliar words. She offers logical ideas in class, but struggles to make them clear and academic.

These students exemplify just a few of the many thousands of backgrounds that challenge and enrich the process of learning how to do school things in school ways with school language.

Capitals, Registers, and Expectations

Imagine the following scenario:

It is your first day in law school. Going to law school is now a requirement for every job, including teaching. You arrive at class and sit next to folks who have studied for many years and did well on a big standardized test to be there. As the professor starts talking, you recognize the words, but they don't mean what they usually do, and each sentence in the book takes up half the page. The professor asks a question, and four eager hands shoot up around you. One person answers in long sentences and unfamiliar words. Another person adds something about previous court cases from fifty years ago. You sit there baffled and never raise your hand.

This scenario is not unlike the experiences of many students in schools around the world. They enter settings for which they lack academic capital—the valued knowledge and communication skills that get passed on to most mainstream children and are reinforced at school (Bourdieu, 1986). Different types of capital reinforce each other to help students succeed in school.

Types of Capital

Just as money and things are unequally distributed in society, so are the less visible words, skills, and knowledge that give people advantages (Bourdieu, 1986). We can think of students as having varying combinations of four overlapping types of capital: social, cultural, knowledge, and linguistic.

Social capital consists of the amounts and qualities of interactions with adults, siblings, and peers; listening abilities; empathy skills; and appropriate behaviors and responses. Cultural capital tends to consist of travel experiences, wealth, parent education, music listened to, games at home, being read to, reading, race, and religion-related experiences (which are especially helpful for figurative thinking). Knowledge capital tends to accumulate from reading, being read to, watching educational and news programs on TV, using computers, developing organizational abilities with knowledge, word memory abilities, travel, conversations with siblings and adults, and parents who ask and answer questions about the world.

I have seen cases where knowledge and cultural capital have influenced math learning. Sara and Armando, for example, lacked the experiences with math-related topics that help mainstream students visualize what they are reading in math class. They got bogged down by less important aspects of the problems, which diverted them from solving the problems. In one math book, for example, three questions in a row dealt with scores in miniature golf, baseball, and football, which are unfamiliar sports for many English learners. Other topics in the math questions included weight loss, elevators, temperatures in Fahrenheit, savings accounts, Mount Everest, driving distances in miles, basketball, a table game with a spinner, ice cream revenues, weightlifting, skiing, snow melt, and airfares. Identifying and explaining these concepts can help students do the math and equip them with cultural capital for other situations.

Linguistic capital consists of the quantity and quality of language used by parents and peers, in TV shows, and in daily discussions; of religious interactions, which can develop abilities to use abstract language; of computer experiences and games; and of books at home, whether one is reading oneself or being read to. Regional dialects also figure in. And as we shall see in more detail in chapter 2, thinking skills are assets that help students develop linguistic capital, and vice versa. Students with such capital know what, when, and how to speak and write well in school settings.

Families pass on these different types of capital to their children, who “invest them” in school and the working world. The children then pass on old and new forms of capital to their own children. As these assets build up, students store necessary knowledge and skills for when the teacher, be it in kindergarten or in eleventh-grade biology, asks them to construct new learning on top of what is already there. If a lot is already there, then learning is much less work, with much less likelihood of failure. And as is generally true in the case of financial capital, the rich get richer.

Registers

The more capital we have, the better we are at adjusting our language according to the situation and the audience. A distinctly adjusted way of talking is called a register, “a variety of a language distinguished according to use” (Halliday, 1978, p. 87). We all use a variety of registers in a variety of settings such as home, school, work, meetings, interviews, sporting events, and social gatherings. The register of each setting develops and is developed by its members over long periods of time. Take a moment to think about how your language is different at a party than it is when meeting with a professor or an administrator.

Mainstream social groups tend to integrate aspects of academic registers into their children's socialization more than other groups do (Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983). For example, some parents ask their children math, history, and science questions while they are eating, reading a book, or watching TV. Other parents have children recount what happened that day, and the parents do the same with each other. Whether intentional or not, such practices can give students advantages in their development of academic registers. And school designers, teachers, test makers, and textbook publishers all use their own ideas of what is proper school language (derived from their own socialization and schooling) to create expectations for how students use language each day. Academic registers (e.g., technical, medical, and educational languages) that are acquired later in life tend to shape a person's social language, or register. And schooling experiences, work environment, travel experiences, the media, and genres of reading all reshape adult social and home registers throughout life. Parents then hand down these reshaped home registers to their children (Gee, 1996). And the cycle continues.

Sometimes registers clash. As we saw with David, students are often dealing with a dual audience: they simultaneously want to please the teacher (or at least get a decent grade) and impress their peers. These audiences can conflict, as a student might not want to appear too studious, be a teacher's pet, be laughed at, or stick out too much from the expectations of a peer group. One strategy is to give the right answer to the teacher but give it in nonmainstream English. For example, in an eighth-grade science class, a student said, “A nucleus don't have no electrons in it.” In this particular case, I had heard the student use the mainstream form (“doesn't have any”) with me in a social conversation, but he did not and may never use this form in front of his peers. This solves his dilemma in the present, but may not help him develop more advanced uses of academic language for when he needs them.

Invisible Criteria

Diverse students can become the casualties of invisible criteria in school. This happens when we (teachers, schools, tests) assess students on things that we haven't taught (Schleppegrell, 2004). We use criteria, invisible to us and to students, that depend heavily on background knowledge and language features, many of which come from non-school experiences. We also can make wrong and harmful assumptions about students' knowledge, background, and thinking. Understanding these assumptions and the criteria we use to teach each day is imperative if we are to create an optimal classroom environment for all students.

Many of us reward home-based skills without realizing it. We unconsciously expect certain ways of talking about texts and expressing ideas in writing—ways that are often rooted in our own cultural values and beliefs. Then we reward those ways that most align with our own expectations of evidence of learning. It would be silly, as Bartolomé (1998) points out, “for teachers to expect linguistic-minority and other minority students, including working class whites, to pull academic discourses out of a hat and magically and effectively use it across class and cultural boundaries” (p. 119). Yet this is often what happens. For example, guess which of these students got the higher grade from his or her answer:

Martin: Like, to divide em, you turn the second one over and times it by the first one. But ya gotta see if any numbers fit into the top and bottom to cross em out and get em smaller so you don't get big numbers at the end. At the end you see if you can make the top and bottom as small as possible.

Leslie: In order to divide two fractions, take the reciprocal of the second one and multiply it by the first. Before multiplying, though, see if any numerators and denominators have common factors that cancel out. For example, if a 9 is above and 3 below, divide by 3 and you end up with 3 on top and 1 below. Multiply the numerators across the top and the denominators across the bottom. See if the answer can be further reduced.

Both of these students understood the content, but Leslie used more academic language. Do we grade Leslie higher because of the more advanced language she used? If so, have we taught that language, or did she learn it at home? This is a pair of questions that we must continue to ask ourselves. Often the answer is yes for the first and home for the second.

Teachers often have invisible criteria even for very basic practices in school. In her well-known study, Sarah Michaels (1986) found that middle-class mainstream teachers considered the narratives shared by working-class African American students to be illogical and confusing. According to “standard” English–speaking middle-class teachers, children did not follow linear lines of thought, assumed too much shared background knowledge with the audience, and signaled importance with culturally based intonation and prosodic cues. Working-class African American students, especially girls, tended to tell more episodic accounts that shifted between scenes, whereas the European American students tended to tell topic-centered stories that focused on one event. What Michaels and others have shown is that ways of interpreting meaning differ greatly, depending on one's socialization and experiences with language. We must therefore be able to validate the thinking processes and languages that students bring with them, while also explicitly teaching new forms of school language.

Many of our diverse students end up doing a lot of guesswork as they figure out what it means to “read critically,” “speak clearly,” “write in an organized fashion,” “stick to the point,” or “use your own words.” Although directions and prompts such as these may seem to be common knowledge and self-evident, we must make extra efforts to be clear, offering examples and modeling. For this reason it is important to analyze patterns of school language, even in what we think are basic directions and statements. Mary Schleppegrell (2004) adds, “Students' difficulties in ‘reasoning,' for example, may be due to their lack of familiarity with the linguistic properties of the language through which the reasoning is expected to be presented, rather than to the inherent difficulty of the cognitive processes involved” (p. 2). That is, the words and their organization may be a more significant issue in learning than the actual content or skills that we are teaching.

Mainstream students have acquired more than just linguistic knowledge that gives them an edge in school. They have, as Gee (1992) points out, acquired knowledge about “ways of being in the world, ways of acting, thinking, interacting, valuing, believing, speaking, and sometimes writing and reading, connected to particular identities and social roles” (p. 73). If we fail to directly teach academic ways of doing and communicating to our diverse students, what can result is the “pedagogy of entrapment,” a term Donald Macedo (1994, p. 34) used to refer to situations in which schools require from students the academic discourse skills and knowledge that we don't teach.

Many educators highlight the need for teachers to directly teach students how to use academic language in school settings (Bartolomé, 1998; Delpit, 1995; Scarcella, 2003). We must strive to make the criteria visible—first to us and then to our students. We then take a close look at what we expect from students as they talk, read, write, and think about our content area. By making our expectations explicit and clear, we begin the process of accelerating their progress and narrowing the gap between them and higher-performing groups of students.

The Need to Value and Challenge

So why is there a preference for academic language and literacy practices in school and work settings? The social reality is that dominant socioeconomic and political groups strongly influence what is valued in a society (Freire & Macedo, 1987). In other words, the middle and upper classes tend to define what is intellectual, logical, linguistically appropriate, academic, and organized in a given setting. Dominant groups then set up systems (e.g., certain types of testing and teaching practices) for preserving power and limiting the access of nonmainstream groups to such systems. Although these systems supposedly evaluate abilities, much of what is tested is the cultural capital and language abilities that align with mainstream expectations. For this reason, we must continuously reflect on the power that language has to separate, marginalize, and oppress.

Another problem in schools is that teachers (along with schools and surrounding society) do not value the knowledge and language skills that linguistically diverse students bring to class. Devaluing students' ways of making sense of the world also devalues those students. I have seen many classrooms and transcribed classroom discussions that show blatant teacher bias and devaluation of student language practices. Teachers, in trying to force students to change their speech drastically, actually shut down students from speaking and participating altogether (Delpit, 1995). And all of us can be susceptible to harmful attitudes, assumptions, and expectations when it comes to student language use. Consider the following conversation from a sixth-grade English learner in a language arts class:

Teacher:

Okay, what did the Egyptians believe about death?

Student:

In the afterlife.

Teacher:

Okay, please use a complete sentence.

Student:

The Egyptians believe in the afterlife.

Teacher:

Bel

ieved,

past tense. Good. Now what does that mean?

Student:

Like, let's say you die and they make you a mummy and—

Teacher:

Okay, you can say, “When a person died, he or she was mummified.” What else?

Student:

Nothin'.

We must create learning spaces for our diverse students so that they build from what they have and add the knowledge and language skills they will need in future schooling and work. We must challenge students to expand their linguistic capital. Yet at the same time, we must be willing to push back against society's narrow-minded expectations (often evidenced through tests, writing samples, and grading practices) and limited perceptions of our students' abilities. Some argue, for example, that our schools should “accept wider varieties of expression, to embrace multiple ways of communicating” (Zamel & Spack, 1998, p. xi). Our diverse students' knowledge and linguistic abilities are assets that we should integrate into how and what we teach.

Being on the Same Page

No message is ever perfectly communicated between two people. My meanings of apple or honesty or revolution will always differ slightly from yours. All the past events and texts and images that formed my meanings for a word are different from yours. And the meanings in the minds of our students can differ even more. This becomes a difficult reality when we begin to communicate academic, abstract, and complex topics.

When ideas are transformed into speech, transmitted, and then turned back into ideas, some things are lost in the translation, so to speak. This is more pronounced the more the speaker and listener differ, such as when backgrounds differ (e.g., mainstream and nonmainstream, young and old, male and female, rich and poor). A listener, for example, has expectations about the speaker's topic and predicts what will be said. Such predictions, along with confirmations and surprises, help the listener constantly sculpt the ideas into something meaningful. Yet a common understanding between listener and speaker is doubly difficult to achieve when communicating abstract topics between two people with very different backgrounds (e.g., mainstream teacher and nonmainstream student). Both participants need to edge closer to the middle of common understanding through the use of communication strategies.

For communication to happen, each participant in the communication process must share knowledge of the language's symbols (words, sentences, gestures) and organization. For example, educators need to know what the words access, curriculum, and adaptation mean when talking about curriculum adaptation. Shared knowledge is common for a fairly homogeneous group of people with similar backgrounds and language experiences. But in school, because most classrooms are large and diverse and because students are very different from teachers, we seldom have clear agreement on the meanings of words and their arrangements, even though we might see many nodding heads. If a teacher uses too many unknown words and complex sentences for a student to understand, then communication isn't happening. If I tell you, “The fargly merglettes grooked all the mestip,” you will have no idea what I am saying, even though you might be able to answer multiple-choice questions about who did what (e.g., “What did the merglettes do?”). Too often teachers and tests assume that students know the symbols and the complex ways in which symbols are organized in school (Wong Fillmore & Snow, 2000). These assumptions hurt students later when they cannot meet academic expectations in advanced courses.

An important element of communicating meaning is shared background knowledge (Cazden, 2001). Many teachers assume that students share similar images and concepts in their heads. This assumption allows teachers to default to practices such as having students listen to lectures, read textbooks, and do worksheet activities. It also allows teachers to not say or explain what they assume students already know. In such cases, diverse students must gain much more of their learning from the words in the book or by listening to the teacher than their mainstream peers need to do. Diverse students must work much harder to fill in ideas and construct meaning.