7.4 Academic Language, Literacy Development, and D...
As demonstrated above, the language used in academic writing, or academic language, has characteristic features that distinguish it from everyday language or other varieties of language. These features are functional for construing knowledge and value in academic disciplines. In other words, academic language is the language in which academic disciplines are codified, transmitted, critiqued, learned, and renovated. As such, academic language is widely recognized as crucial to not only academic writing development but also disciplinary learning and school success. Heller and Morek (2015) suggested that academic language plays three roles in schooling: communicative, epistemic, and socio-symbolic. First, academic language is a medium of knowledge transmission. It is an indispensable resource for construing, presenting, and communicating educational and disciplinary knowledge in academic contexts. As students advance through schools (elementary-secondary-tertiary), they are expected to engage with progressively more complex and specialized knowledge. This engagement calls for new ways of using language. Specifically, students must develop, in the words of Christie (2002), "the capacity to deploy language in ways that abstract away from immediate, lived experience, to build instead truths, abstractions, generalizations, and arguments about areas of life of various kinds" (p. 66).
Second, academic language is a tool for thinking and intellectual development. It promotes systematic thinking and scientific reasoning. It enables execution of higher order cognitive operations such as abstraction, generalization, interpretation, and argument, allowing students to reconstrue their experience with the social, natural, and imagined worlds.
Third, academic language is a ticket and a visiting card. As a school-privileged form of discourse, academic language represents a cultural capital, acting as a gate-keeper to educational and disciplinary knowledge and ideology. For this reason, academic language has been seen as a "discourse of appropriateness" that privileges, reinforces, legitimates, and naturalizes dominant White perspectives on the standard linguistic and cultural practices of racialized/minoritized communities (Flores & Rosa, 2015). This critique notwithstanding, it is well recognized that control over academic language gives students power and agency in literacy development, knowledge building, identity construction, social positioning, and career advancement. Without access to academic language, students are at a distinct disadvantage in school learning and academic success, further exacerbating existing educational inequality and social injustice.(https://www.daowen.com)
The literacy and learning problems experienced by many students in school have been attributed in large part to their struggle with academic language (Schleppegrell, 2004; Snow & Uccelli, 2009). A lack of familiarity with and proficiency in academic language limits access to knowledge, impedes thinking and reasoning, handicaps learning and communication, undermines a sense of self-efficacy and personal empowerment, reduces opportunities for effective classroom participation, increases the risk for academic failure, and minimizes opportunities for career advancement. As Francis et al. (2006) observed, "Mastery of academic language is arguably the single most important determinant of academic success for individual students" (p. 7). Empirical research (e.g., Fang & Park, 2020; Figueroa, Meneses & Chandia, 2018) confirms that academic language is a significant factor that positively impacts students' writing/reading performance and their academic achievement.