What is Academic Language and Why Do We Need To Teach It?
The foundation of school success is academic language and literacy in English.
For English learners to have access to core content, they need academic language and literacy skills. (Echevarria et al, 2013)
Level of competence required to understand “teacher talk”, lectures, and other educational presentations, as well as to read textbooks, write reports and complete research projects and other academic tasks (Coelo, 2004)
Academic language is the knowledge of the less frequent vocabulary of English as well as the ability to interpret and produce increasingly complex written language.
The vocabulary in school content areas includes many words that derive from Latin and Greek sources as well as increasingly sophisticated grammatical constructions and discourse conventions that are almost never used in everyday conversation. (Cummins and Early, 2015)
Academic language should be taught across the curriculum because ELLs typically require much longer to attain grade expectations in academic aspects of English than in social or conversational aspects