发布时间：2016-08-12 18:18浏览数：2233评论数：1 收藏
Over the past decade, the significant improvement of students’ English proficiency as well as their more active engagement in international academic exchanges and scientific collaboration have together posed a new challenge to university EFL teachers. The agenda for an “Academic English” program as such is thus called for by an increasing number of universities in their English curricula. In light of the students’ needs to master and the teachers’ needs to better this particular type of language use, we expect to shed light on its teaching and research by introducing a few theoretical methods and practical guidance in this issue’s “hot topic”. We hope what the experts and practitioners share in this forum would benefit our teaching and research.
Zhihui Fang 教授
专家简介
What is Academic Language?
The notion of academic language has received considerable attention in the literature on second language learning and more recently, in literacy education. Although a consensus definition of academic language has yet to emerge, most scholars associate it with the language, oral or written, for doing academic work in school. At least three lines of scholarship contribute to the conception of academic language. The sociolinguistic work of the early 1980s (e.g., Heath, 1983; Michaels, 1981; Snow, 1983) shows that teachers have certain expectations about language use in school-based tasks (e.g., group sharing time, reading alouds, writing conference) and that children who come from homes and communities where language use is different from school expectations are often disadvantaged and disempowered, leading to their lack of engagement in classroom literacy events and ultimately their literacy underachievement and school failure.
The idea that children’s home, or everyday, language differs from school-based, or academic, language was brought to the forefront of educators’ consciousness when Cummins (1981, 1984), working in bilingual settings with a focus on assessment issues, introduced a distinction between what he called “Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills” (BICS) and “Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency” (CALP). BICS, or everyday language, refers to the language used on the playground, in the lunchroom, at birthday parties, or in other day-to-day social interactional contexts. CALP, or academic language, refers to the language used for effective participation in subject area learning in school. According to Cummins, academic language is cognitively more demanding and, hence, takes much longer (5-7 years) to develop than everyday language (6 months to two years).
Cummins’ binary distinction raises our awareness of the gap between everyday and academic language and reminds us of the detrimental effects of conflating the two in assessing students’ academic performance. At the same time, however, it has been criticized for privileging school-based language and for offering an impoverished view of everyday language (Haneda, 2014). Functional linguists (e.g., Bailey, 2007; Gibbons, 2006; Schleppegrell, 2004) have worked to address this issue by foregrounding the role of context in language use. Drawing on Halliday’s (1978, 1985) work on language in context (or register), these scholars argued that academic language is best conceptualized along the continuum of mode, from contexts of informal spontaneous interaction to contexts of formal written communication. Emphasizing that language use varies according to context and purpose, they showed that the language that is functional for doing school (i.e., academic language) is different from the language that students use to socialize with family members and friends in their daily life (i.e., everyday language). This difference, as summarized by Snow and Uccelli (2009), lies along the dimensions of interpersonal stance (detached and authoritative vs. involved and interactional), information load (concise and dense vs. redundant and sparse), organization of information (thing oriented vs. action oriented, embedded clauses vs. coordinate and subordinate clauses, within-text references vs. outside-text references), lexical choices (diverse, precise, and formal vocabulary vs. limited, imprecise, and informal vocabulary), and representational congruence (compact and incongruent grammar vs. simple and congruent grammar, abstract concepts as agentive subjects of sentences vs. animate entities as grammatical agents of sentences).
Academic language is not a unitary construct, however. Its forms and functions vary by subject matter, task, purpose, and grade level, asdifferent forms of knowledge and ways of meaning require different kinds of academic language. Also contributing to this variety is the deepening of globalization and the growing presence of multilingual disciplinary specialists (with their values and discursive styles) in English-speaking countries, as these phenomena challenge the homogeneity of academic language and bring about diversity and hybridity in the way language is used in academic and disciplinary settings (Canagarajah&Jerskey, 2009). According to Fang (2012), academic language can be conceived of as the braiding of three strands of language – everyday language, abstract language, and metaphoric language, with the shape of the braid determined by factors such as topic, context, and purpose. Any text is an instantiation of a particular braiding, with certain strands more heavily present in some texts than in others. Recognizing and responding to the different shapes and features of academic languageis key to supporting students’ academic work in school.
More recently, scholars have argued that the notion “academic language” needs to be expanded to “academic communication” to account for the multimodal and multisemiotic nature of today’s school-based texts and students’ expanding communicative repertoires inside and outside of school. Modern science texts, for example, contain “not just words in sentences and paragraphs, but tables, charts, diagrams, graphs, maps, drawings, photographs, and a host of specialized visual representations from acoustical sonograms to chromatography strips and gene maps” (Lemke, 2002, p. 24). As Haneda (2014) pointed out, communication in academic settings takes the form of not only natural language but also physical action, material artifacts, and other semiotic tools such as graphs, diagrams, and images. In other words, academic language is only one of the communicative repertoires of academic communication. This means that attention to both linguistic and non-linguistic means of academic communication is critical to ensuring students’ success in school and beyond.
References
Bailey, A. (2007). The language demands of school: Putting academic English to the test. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Canagarajah, S., & Kerskey, M. (2009). Meeting the needs of advanced multilingual writers. In R. Beard, D. Myhill, J. Riley, & M. Nystrand (Eds.), The Sage handbook of writing development (pp. 472-488). London: Sage.
Cummins, J. (1981). Four misconceptions about language proficiency in bilingual education. NABEJournal, 5(3), 31– 45.
Cummins, J. (1984) Bilingual education and special education: Issues in assessment and pedagogy. San Diego: College Hill.
Fang, Z. (2012). Language correlates of disciplinary literacy. Topics in Language Disorders, 32(1), 19-34.
Gibbons, P. (2006). Bridging discourse in the ESL classroom: Students, teachers, and researchers. London: Continuum.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic. London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Haneda, M. (2014). From academic language to academic communication: Building on English learners’ resources. Linguistics and Education, 26, 126-135.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michaels, S. (1981). “Sharing Time”: Children’s narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in Society, 10(3), 423- 442.
Lemke, J. (2002). Multimedia semiotics: Genres for science education and scientific literacy. In M. J. Schleppegrell & M. C. Colombi (Eds.), Developing advanced literacy in first and second language: Meaning with power (pp. 21-44). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schleppegrell, M. J. (2004). The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Snow, C. E. (1983). Literacy and language: Relationships during the preschool years. Harvard Educational Review, 53, 165–189.
Snow, C., & Uccelli, P. (2009). The challenge of academic language. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy (pp. 112-133). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mary Schleppegrell 教授
专家简介
When academic writers present the results of their research to scholars in their fields, they need to be clear and accurate in how they represent what they have found. But they also need to position their results in relation to other work in the field, and when they do so they inevitably convey a perspective and stance toward their own work and that of others. It is important for academic writers to be measured and careful about what they say or imply about other views and about how they position themselves in dialogue with other researchers, as well as to calibrate the level of commitment they express about the propositions they are putting forward. Novice writers need support in learning to present such a stance in nuanced ways.
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language in context that offers academic writers insights and tools for considering the language choices they make and understanding the impact of different language choices (Halliday, 1978; 1994). Through its functional grammar, SFL offers academic writers perspectives on three aspects of meaning that are always infused into any text they write: ideational meaning that presents the “content,” textual meaning that enables the text to be structured to present a message, and interpersonal meaning that enables the writer to enact a relationship with the research community. Recently, researchers analyzing interpersonal meaning have offered academic writers new understandings about the language resources that enable them to modulate the strength of their commitment to the claims they make, interact with other researchers in ways that are respectful and yet assertive, and, when appropriate, to concede points in effective ways.
Much of this work draws on SFL’s Engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005). The Engagement framework offers analytic tools that can be made available to learners of academic writing to show them how to both “open up” dialogic space in their writing and to “close down” dialogic space. For example, Chang and Schleppegrell (2011) analyzed published texts to identify linguistic resources that present different stances.Here a writer presents a statement about what other research says, “entertaining” a perspectivewithout taking a position on it:
It is argued that future goals may fail to motivate school achievement for two main reasons:
Using it is argued enables the writer to introduce a perspective without aligning with it, and using may presents this claim as less than certain. Of course, for a stance to be convincingly presented, it is important that the perspective be developed not just in one sentence, but across the text. Here the notion of “prosody” – how meanings are consistently conveyed(Hood, 2006) – is important.The writer continues bysuggesting possible reasons that “future goals may fail to motivate school achievement:”
because students may not perceive a clear positive connection between doing well in school and success later in life; and because they may not experience future goals as internally driven or self-set goals but rather as externally controlled or imposed from the outside.
The repetition ofmayhere resonates with the mayin the initiating clause, reinforcing the message that these are proposals and not claims.
Chang and Schleppegrell (2011)also illustrated how academic writers can make language choices that distance them from other views and that reject other perspectives in measured and thoughtful ways. Chang (2010) described a corpus tool that supported writers in raising awareness about their own deployment of authorial voice, and Chang and Schleppegrell (2016) reported on the learning of stance expressions that the tool afforded. They found that learners more easily identified stances that presented assertive claims and factual statements. Despite this, they tended to makeinappropriately assertive and unsubstantiatedclaims. They were also weak in modulating their stance expression across a text, failing to achieve a consistent prosody.
Other recent researchhasalso drawn on the Engagement framework to explore the rhetorical moves made by academic writers. Miller, Mitchell, and Pessoa (2014), for example, analyzed the language resources used by second language writers in a university history course. Their longitudinal study found significant differences in the ways high- and low-achieving students refer to, concede, and counter points in a source text. Effective patterning of engagement resources helped high-achieving writers adopt a measured, academic voice that was convincingly persuasive. The authors drew implications from this for supporting students’ writing development. Lancaster (2014) reported on how instructors responded to different stance patternsin students’ texts, exploring what is valued in different university disciplines. Ryshina-Pankova (2014) showed how second language writers participating in course-related blogs alternated between the expanding and contracting options that enabled the presentation of successful arguments. These writers also pointed to potential contradictions when they presented evidence; something raters valued.
In writing pedagogy, it is important to go beyond error correction and a focus on linguistic accuracy and help learners develop a repertoire of language resources to accomplish the challenging and consequential moves they need to make as academic writers. SFL theory offers many tools for drawing learners’ attention to the ways language works to present valued meanings. In particular, the Engagement framework offers tools for raising their awareness about the ways academic writers position themselves in relation to what they are claiming and what others have said.
References
Chang, P. (2010). Taking an effective authorial stance in academic writing: Inductive learning for second language writers using a stance corpus. UnpublishedPh.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Available from Dissertation and Theses database. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/77860
Chang, P., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2011). Taking an effective authorial stance in academic writing: Making the linguistic resources explicit for L2 writers in the social sciences. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(3), 140-151.
Chang, P., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2016). Explicit learning of authorial stance-taking by L2 doctoral students. Journal of Writing Research, 8(1), 299-322.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (Second ed.). London: Edward Arnold.
Hood, S. (2006). The persuasive power of prosodies: radiating values in academic writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 37–49.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miller, R. T., Mitchell, T. D., & Pessoa, S. (2014). Valued voices: Students’ use of Engagement in argumentative history writing. Linguistics and Education, 28, 107-120.
Lancaster, Z. (2014). Exploring Valued patterns of Stance in upper-Level Student writing in the Disciplines. Written Communication, 31(1), 27-57.
Ryshina-Pankova, M. (2014). Exploring academic argumentation in course-related blogs through ENGAGEMENT. In G. Thompson & L. Alba (Eds.), Evaluation in context (pp. 281-302). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Mariana Achugar 副教授
专家简介
Designing a disciplinary L2 reading environment
The goal of disciplinary literacy lessons is to support students’ learning of content through reading. We focus on learning content from reading texts while developing metacognitive awareness. Teachers and students explore what a text means and how that meaning is made through particular lexico-grammatical and discourse-semantic choices critically reflecting on those meanings.
We designed an approach to work with texts in order to learn content in multilingual classrooms (e.g. Achugar, 2009). Drawing on previous reading research (Brown & Palincsar, 1984) that showed struggling readers improved their reading comprehension through mediated learning experiences such as participating in joint practices using skills such as summarizing, questioning, clarifying and predicting. Our approach to disciplinary literacy provides students with a guided experience and explicit instruction in reading comprehension and monitoring activities. By making predictions, questioning the text and evaluating author’s choices, students make their hypothesis about the meaning and relevance of texts explicit and their interpretations become accountable to the community.
To design our lessons we follow a five-part process: 1) identify key content issues/questions; 2) select relevant text based on the significance for the discipline; 3) perform a linguistic analysis of the text to identify potential comprehension challenges for students; 4) design a task for whole group reading of the text focus on making visible the role of language on constructing particular types of meanings; and 5) critically evaluate the text and assess students’ understanding.
For example, when analyzing the declaration of independence text the teacher began by contextualizing the text asking about who had written it, when it had been written and why it was written. Then he asked students to look at the text closely, focusing on identifying the main verbs and their associated participants in order to figure out what the wording tells us about how society was structured at the time and what the authors wanted to do with the text. They also explored alternative wording choices to think about what this particularly choices signified.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all menare created equal”
The teacher put the text on the board and lead students in the reading and analysis of the wording, asking students what the main verbs were (hold, are created) and what they meant. Then he asked students to identify what the participants were (We, all men). The identification of the wording enabled the class to make explicit information that was not in the text, such as who “we” referred to and what “men” meant at that time. They also explored the use of the passive voice, “are created” and discussed who was the actor creating and how “men” may be “equal”. This detailed discussion around wording choices enabled students to explore more abstract historical issues such as the social how social equality and rights were defined at that time. For a more detailed description of these lessons see Carpenter, Achugar& Earhart (2014) and Achugar & Stainton (2010).
The following chart offers an example of how teachers can decide the type of language focused activities that can be done to guide students close reading of the text focusing on getting through meaning via the analysis of wording choices.
Table1: Guiding questions to select text analysis focus
Adapted from Achugar & Stainton(2010)
Learning from texts in a foreign language requires an integrated focus on language and content. Providing students with the tools and experiences to work with texts to understand how meanings are made and what inferences and connections to other texts can be done can be a useful teaching and learning strategy (Achugar& Carpenter, 2012).
References
Achugar, M. (2009) Designing environments for teaching and learning history in multilingual contexts. Invited contribution in a special issue on Education and Immigration edited by Leigh Patel Stevens. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 6(1-2):39-62.
Achugar, M. & Carpenter, B. (2012) Developing disciplinary literacy in a multilingual history classroom. Linguistics and Education 23 (3): 262-276.
Achugar, M., Schleppegrell, M. &Oteiza, T. (2007). Engaging teachers in language analysis: A functional linguistics approach to reflective literacy. English Teaching Practice and Critique 6(2): 8-24.
Achugar, Mariana & Stainton, Catherine (2010) “Learning history and learning language: Focusing on Language in Historical Explanations to Support English Language Learners”. In M. K. Stein & L. Kucan (eds.) Instructional Explanations in the Disciplines, pp.145-169. New York: Springer.
Brown, A. & Palincsar, A. (1984) Instructing comprehension-fostering activities in interactive learning situations. In Mandl, H., Stein, N. &Trabasso, T. (eds.) Learning and Comprehension of Text, pp. 255-286. NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
Carpenter, B., Earhart, M. & Achugar, M. (2014) Teaching with documents in the multilingual classroom. The History Teacher 48(1): 91-103.
Christie, F. & B. Derewianka (2008). School discourse: Learning to write across the years of schooling. London, Continuum.
Coffin, C. (2006). Historical Discourse: The language of time, cause, and evaluation. London, Continuum.
Fang, Z. (2006). The language demands of science reading in middle school. International Journal of Science Education 28(5): 491-520.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. London, Edward Arnold.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1993a). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics & Education 5(2): 93-116.
Schleppegrell, M. (2001). Linguistic features of the language of schooling. Linguistics and Education 12(4): 431-459.
Schleppegrell, M. , Achugar, M. & Oteiza, T. (2004). The grammar of history: Enhancing content- based instruction through a functional focus on language. TESOL Quarterly 38(1): 67-93.
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