Ultimately, therefore, if learners are not to be disadvantaged in their long-term learning, and are to have the time and opportunity to learn the subject-specific discourses of school, all subject learning needs to be integrated with the teaching of academic language, along with the recognition by all teachers that they are teachers of language, not simply of subject “content.” Without this focus on language, schools cannot provide education that leads to equitable outcomes.
The challenge for teachers and school leaders, therefore, is how to plan a curriculum that integrates subject learning with related academic language, and how to provide the appropriate language support that will enable all students to develop the essential academic and subject-based language for learning across the curriculum. Margo Gottlieb and Mariana Castro have taken up that challenge in this book. Language Power focuses on the key uses of academic language, demonstrates how these uses can be integrated, assessed, and implemented, and suggests ways to involve and collaborate with the broader school community. The book is aimed primarily at practitioners and educators in the field and provides not only theoretical frameworks for teachers, teacher leaders, and other professionals to think about their own professional work, but also a wealth of practical ideas, teacher tools, and language-centered resources for use in the classroom. These resources are based on the assumption that all language development involves a continuing process of meaning making; that academic language is best learned in the context of actually using it for authentic purposes across the curriculum; and that teachers themselves need time and support for their own professional learning. These are important messages not only for classroom-based teachers but also for teacher leaders and administrators.
Language Power urges teachers and other professional educators to “reenvision” teaching and, through a better understanding of the role that academic language plays in learning and school assessment, to see it as more than the teaching of subject content. Using interactive activities to stimulate in-depth conversations between teachers, the authors suggest a process for reflecting on teaching in new ways. Central to this reflection is a conceptual tool they refer to as DARE (discuss, argue, recount, and explain). DARE is used in many contexts throughout the book, and through these reflections teachers are able to not only increase their own understanding of the nature of academic language but also understand how this tool can be used with their students in all areas of the curriculum.
This thought-provoking and very practical book will be welcomed by all educators who are striving to provide a more equitable curriculum for students. As the book suggests, this endeavor requires classroom teachers to think critically about the language they use with students, and develop the knowledge and skills to provide students with explicit and well-planned support for the development of academic language. Language Power will assist educators in making these endeavors a reality.
—Pauline Gibbons
Author of Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning, Second Edition and Associate Professor, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Reference
Berry, B. (2016). Teacher leadership and deeper learning for all students. Center for Teaching Quality. Retrieved from http://www.teachingquality.org/deeperlearning.
About This Book
Language Power: Key Uses for Accessing Content is a book for teachers and school leaders seeking to provide students equitable access to content and language practices throughout the school day. Most important, in preparing our students for college, career, community, and acquisiton of 21st century classroom skills, we emphasize collaboration, multimodalities, critical thinking, and problem solving. A common thread among these skills is the role that language plays in their development and execution. As a matter of fact, language plays an essential role in all learning, and for this reason, we focus the book on language—more specifically, academic language use.
The Purposes for the Book
Academic language has caught the attention of the educational community because of its positive link to academic success (Friedberg, Mitchell, & Brooke, 2016). There is a substantial body of literature on academic language, from theoretical frameworks (Bailey & Butler, 2007; Cummins, 1981; Gottlieb, 2003; Scarcella, 2003; Zacarian, 2012), to research reviews (Anstrom et al., 2010; de Oliveira, 2013; Snow & Uccelli, 2009) to instructional approaches (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2017). Recently, academic language has been recognized in standards, for content, including college and career readiness standards (de Oliveira, 2016), language development standards (WIDA, 2012), and both sets of standards (Gottlieb & Ernst-Slavit, 2014a). Additionally, we have witnessed the grounding of academic language curriculum design as enacted in standards-referenced classrooms (Gottlieb & Ernst-Slavit, 2013, 2014b; Zwiers, 2014).
Given the growing body of literature on academic language, we wished to create an easy-to-read guide that consolidates the complexities of language learning into practical ideas from a range of perspectives. With that backdrop in mind, we wrote this book around three main purposes:
1 To highlight the critical role of academic language use in a variety of contexts tied to teaching and learning
2 To present a conceptual tool—DARE—to facilitate students’ and teachers’ academic language use within and across the disciplines or content areas
3 To offer educators language-centered resources to add to their instructional and assessment repertoires
It is our intent to ensure that every teacher has an understanding of the importance of academic language use in their craft, no matter who their students are and what their discipline is. We feel confident that this goal can be accomplished, as we have distilled the literature, combed instructional materials, analyzed standards, and had deep conversations with our colleagues over multiple years. These experiences have been integral to the creation of teacher tools related to academic language use, including Can Do Descriptors, Key Uses Edition, and los descriptores Podemos (see multiple entries of WIDA at the end of this section).
Organization of the Book
The overall organizational scheme for the book is illustrated in the figure “Reenvisioning Teaching and Learning Through Key Uses of Academic Language” at the close of this section. It reflects the centrality of key uses of academic language (in the middle). Its outreach, in the form of a semantic web, shows the varying components of school life that are influenced by academic language use; in each chapter, we elaborate their multiple perspectives.
Additionally, each chapter is arranged around phases of an inquiry cycle: ask, explore, apply, reflect, and take action. There is a central question that is posed in the ask section, examined in explore, and then applied to four different perspectives. In reflect, we summarize the main message of the chapter and then invite you, the reader, to take action. We share with you the central questions and each chapter synopsis so that you have a sense of what to expect.
Chapter 1: What is the nature of key uses of academic language? What is the language associated with each key use? In this introductory chapter, we investigate the construct of academic language and provide a rationale for discuss, argue, recount, and explain (DARE)—key uses of academic language. Subsequently, we identify the language features associated with each key use and offer example language-centered instructional tasks and resources geared to different grade levels. In doing so,