Book’s Blog 6

Chapter 3        Making Sense of the Academic Register of Schooling

Jose is another example of a struggling reader & writer and still lacked academic English although he could communicate socially in English. The Freemans use him as both a typical example of long-term English learner (chapter 1) and a classic example of a student Cummins identified as having conversational fluency but lacking academic language proficiency (chapter 2).  They explore in more details:

1. What is meant by the academic registers of schooling
2. How teachers can plan instruction to help students develop these registers.
3. How to distinguish between oral & written registers of academic language.
4. To consider some complexities of both grammatical & communicative competence.
5. To discuss how students acquire linguistic competence through membership in social groups.

They talk about 2 types of context:

a)     Context of culture that includes ways of doing things and cultural norms for most daily activities.

b)     Context of situation that occurs within a particular culture and is described by 3 elements; field, tenor, and mode.

These three elements constitute a language register, which is the way language is used in particular context of situation within a particular culture. Register can be applied in different ways such as math register & social studies register.  All of this is what Gee calls them Discourses. The Freemans describe how to use the classroom Discourses to build academic registers. There are some specific methods discussed on how to extend the use of academic language in classroom discourse. The author mentions that only repeating an academic concept, or perhaps rephrasing what the student said, does not "extend student talk" and no new learning actually take place. They offers some ways to extend students talk and to help the students to bridge conversational & academic language registers. 

As I said above, they talk about the 5 points in details and move into sociolinguistic competence that guides them to discuss Gee’s primary and secondary Discourses as we studies in this course. Gee argues that language can be understood only within a particular Discourse. His notion of Discourse is similar to the functional linguists’ concept of a register, the language used in a context of situation that exists within a context of culture. However, as a sociolinguistic, Gee focuses on both the social aspects of context and on the linguistic aspects. The Freemans agree with Gee that school constitutes a secondary Discourse for everyone. It is “a place where students negotiate identities” as Cummins (2001) argued bilingual students often develop their identities based on primarily on their lack of academic English proficiency rather than on the many positive attributes they may possess (p. 65).

From this chapter, the Freemans start analyzing academic language at multiple levels such as text, paragraph, sentence, and word. For each of these, they provide examples of academic language and targeted strategies teachers can use as they teach language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The authors also examine subject-specific textbooks, describing the challenges these pose for students and recommending ways to make texts more accessible to ELLs and struggling readers.