Chapter 5: Understanding Academic Language - 3

Focus on Language

One of the main reasons bilingual students end up having trouble keeping up with their fellow students is perhaps that they have learned conversational English so well that teachers and counselors figure they are generally fluent. However, students do not learn Academic English from their friends. They learn it in the classroom. Their friends have had a number of years to build a advantage that the ELL students have to catch up with. Of course there are some Standard English speakers in their classes who didn't quite catch on either when Academic Language was being presented, so any activity to strengthen Academic English is good for the whole class.

In an article from Education Week Research Hones Focus on ELLs Debra Viadero reports on how even the best ELL students tend to fall behind their peers with English as L1, and that researchers agreed that it has something to do with learning Academic English. Following are some short quotes from the article:

What they have yet to nail down is how to help this vulnerable and challenging population of students over the learning hump that comes later in elementary school; how to teach higher-order reading skills, such as comprehension; how to teach adolescents who are new to English; and how to boost achievement in academic subjects other than English.
...
Making matters worse, the existing research on the topic has been dominated by a single, politically explosive question: Should English-language learners be taught, either initially or for an extended period of time, in their native languages?

...five independent research reviews addressing that question over the last 25 years conclude that teaching students in bilingual settings is more effective—at least modestly so—than teaching them only in English.

“I think the evidence is there,” says Diane August, a senior research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, a private research center in Washington. “There’s a lot of transfer that occurs from the first language to the second language.”

...Scholarly views diverge even more over how long it should take for students to master English, with estimates ranging from three to eight years.

...To prod students to talk more, especially in the academic arena, many experts recommend setting up structured cooperative-learning groups so that students can practice speaking under less-threatening circumstances. In fact, a research-based practice guide published last year by the Institute of Education Sciences calls for English-learners to spend at least 90 minutes a week working one-on-one on carefully designed activities with students of different ability and English-proficiency levels.

...the bottom line is that the research suggests that English-learners need some sort of classroom support if they are ever going to succeed in American classrooms. ...Yet he estimates that 10 percent to 50 percent of ELLs are in classrooms where few, if any, modifications are made to help them overcome their language difficulties. And their numbers are growing, ... even as pressure builds in some states to enact policies that block teachers from using students’ primary language in classes or limit instructional modifications for English-learners.
(Viadero)

Cummins says that ELL students need to develop "critical language awareness, which encompasses exploration of the relationships between language and power." (Cummins, p. 137) In other words, students have to become aware of the differences between colloquial, usually oral, language, and the language of power, which is generally Academic Language. (Even powerful speakers of Ebonics or Latino/American use a different language to convince people, than they in daily conversations.) He suggest turning the students into "language detectives" who discover the differences between colloquial language and the language of power - and academic English, to see how different forms of language are used in different contexts. In this way, there is no denigrating colloquial language, the language of the student's home identity, but the students learn how to use language flexibly.

He talks of enabling students to "harvest the language" (Cummins, p. 139) by being aware of grammatical structures and vocabulary. While most of his suggestions would be more applicable in a more text-based subject than mathematics, there is undeniably a math vocabulary that students must learn to be successful. We must be careful not to dumb down the mathematical vocabulary for these students, but teach it to them instead. (This summer I discovered this while teaching division of polynomial fractions. We were saying that they should "flip" the divisor, until it occurred to us that the students actually knew the term "invert.")

Cummins suggests working with the Graeco-Latin vocabulary, which of course, is prevalent in mathematics, and points out that students with Romance language backgrounds like Spanish are accustomed to using these words. We should have them discover the small differences between the English and Spanish cognate terms. The computer program HELP Math that I discussed in the previous post has an excellent glossary that compares the English and Spanish terms. For students with other languages, we will have to help them build this understanding of the vocabulary and word-building functions of prefixes and suffixes.