Teaching Academic Language

As the title of the blog suggests, it deals with multiliteracies, in the spirit of Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Over the course of the fall '08 semester, I will devote the majority of my time on this blog to thinking and writing about one aspect of a multiliteracies approach to pedagogy, the teaching of academic language in school. I will focus on academic language in middle school and secondary history teaching, but will address questions that pertain to other subject areas across the curriculum.

A central question I will pursue: In what ways can teachers explicitly and implicitly develop students' academic language as they teach history content?

My driving purpose is to develop a theory-into-practice framework to help history teachers support students' language learning, particularly non-native English learners, as well as history content learning. The linguistic demands of history texts and learning tasks pose significant challenges for non-dominant students. By explicitly framing the language of middle school and secondary history and reflecting on ways that teachers can scaffold students into these types of language, I hope to help in rupturing a "pedagogy of entrapment" (Macedo, 1999), whereby many schools expect students to speak, read, and write in certain ways but fail to explicitly teach students how to engage in these practices.

______
Macedo, D. (1999). A pedagogy of entrapment. In Leistyna, P. (1999) Presence of Mind, Westview Press.