In a brewery, located in the Arts District of Rochester NY, sitting over beers, surrounded by artwork by local artists, I had the opportunity to talk to one of my oldest friends about his job as a medical physicist. It was an opportunity not only to learn more about what he did, but to pick his brain about how he used language. His job involves training medical residents on the use of medical imaging equipment, how to calibrate it, how to operate it, how to understand the science behind this incredibly expensive and sensitive machines. Not that these residents will necessarily be operating them, but they need to know about them, they need to understand the basics, what can go wrong, what has to happen for things to go right. The conversation was enlightening. At first he was not sure he was going to have much to say about the subject of academic language, even though he spent nearly 9 years of his life in academia. He was not sure why I had picked him, instead of another friend of ours from High School who is a Astrophysics professor at CUNY in New York City. I asked him what he thought academic language was, and he thought for a moment and responding almost immediately with the reality he faces everyday, different disciplines have different languages, and different vocab and different ways of thinkings, and this is maybe no where more apparent than in science, where things become so specialized that it can be hard for a medical physicist and a nuclear physicist and a particle physicist to all be able to talk to one another. He mentioned the need for accurate, concise and specific language. He even went on to say that he spends at least one hour a month meeting with the residents he is training and intentionally practicing the language of medical physics. When asked why this training was so important his response was that they needed to sound competent, not only to their patients, but to the operators or the devices and the other medical physicists they might come in contact with. Getting the words right led to respect and others in the field’s ability to be able to trust them. The language was a key into being a part of that community, and understanding the science and the equipment was not enough, one had to be able to talk the talk. I was told about how he assigning readings to get them up to speed on the specifics of the new language they are learning, and that during field work he coaches them on the appropriate way to say things, what words to use and in what order and when. “I would say it this way” and “that is not accurate” are common phrases out of his mouth during these moments, he endeavors to create a nurturing environment free from embarrassment where the residents can practice their new language in a safe space, where they can make mistakes and learn from them before facing the medical scientific community, where they will be clearly judged by what they say and how they say it. What was maybe most surprising to me was that this language was more than just a key into a tight community, but it was a part of being a successful professional. To become board certified, a lot of the testing is about language, and reaching that stage is about more than just understanding the principles that go into operating the machinery.
On the other side of the spectrum, I got another opportunity to catch up with a friend I have not seen in years, a friend who I’ve know since my last foray into teaching, in what seems like a world away. We got to drive cross country together and climb a lot, and our kids are about the same age. He moved to Austin some years ago and we do not see each other as much as we would like. He has been a biology for nearly 20 years now and teaches AP Biology and Medical Biology in Austin. We caught up during metal free periods over Zoom. I asked him pretty much the same questions I asked my friend from elementary school, what did academic language mean to him. Again, he took a moment (I have to think that moment to think is some sort of sign of intelligence, and made me happy that I asked these two friends) and responded “I don’t know, hmm…, I am assuming it has to do with the language one uses in school and in learning”. I love how close to one of the better text book answers he has come across. Here he was, with students on the other side of learning about science than my friend the medical physicist. What I liked about this teacher’s response is that in terms of science, his big goal around language was to build his student’s confidence and to not be intimidated by dense scientific text. He constantly challenged his students with journal articles, and gave them strategies on how to read them and how to summarize them, and most importantly on how to use them effectively. Much of this was done in more informal ways through the course of the year, but research is central to the way he teaches.
So much of the current discussion around academic language focuses in on what exactly it is, whether it should be taught generally or within specific disciplinary contexts (like science). What to teach, what not to teach, how to teach it, all questions that are regularly asked around Academic Language. The conversation goes even deeper, is academic language biased? Do people put too much emphasis on specific ways of writing? Does it advantage those, mostly white middle class students, who are exposed to it in their homes more often? Does it disadvantage those that are not exposed to academic language on a regular basis?
Whether any of us want to admit it or not, Academic Language matters, at least in certain arenas. It can give someone respect, authority, a sense of competency among peers. Al, my friend who is a medical physicist, made that abundantly clear, and he understands the stakes. Know how to speak the language can make or break someone, it can give them a successful career or a stunted one. Andy, my friend the AP Biology teacher, understands the stakes too and wants to make sure his students are ready, prepared and unintimidated.
Within the field of education, discussing academic language in this way is still a pretty new concept. Until pretty recently discussing academic language was limited to english language learners and how they needed to be taught in a way that would allow them to be successful in school, not just in social settings. Eventually others started to take note, there is a different way of speaking when it is relation to academic pursuits, a way of speaking clearly and concisely with precise vocabulary. Each field has a way of speaking and writing, and the question started to become should we teach discipline specific language. In science I believe this has been happening for years, many journal articles are nearly unintelligible to the uninitiated. But it certainly goes beyond science. I am also a theologian, and academic theology definitely has specific terms and ways of writing that I had to learn while getting my Masters degree, in fact I took a course my first semester that did basically this, taught us how to writing and read theology. I also took foreign and ancient languages, one course actually titled theological french.
I think this is where things can get tricky for High School teachers. How specific does a teacher at the High School level need to get in terms of teaching students these foreign languages that emerge around specific disciplines? In science, students are still learning the language late into PhD programs! How much science does a student need and how does one teach it, particularly when one thinking about the fact that very few of their students will actually go on to be scientists or will ever read a journal article past High School? That does not mean there is no value in teaching more specifically within a discipline, but trying to keep the focus on what will students really need. Many will need to be able to read journalistic articles about climate change or the impact of some sort of industry or development on their community, so there are things all students need to learn, it is just a matter of striking the right balance.
When looking at explicitly teaching academic language, it can be useful to look at how languages are taught for specific disciplines (like my theological french class). In one article I came across, (Krekler, 2013) there was a discussion about how to teach things like german for accounting. Was it better to teach Language for Specific Academic Purposes (LSAP) or Language for General Academic Purposes (LGAP). The challenge for language instructors was that the content specific knowledge needed to teach LSAP classes was high, while it was usually easier to teach LGAP classes. From a practical perspective it is also easier for universities to teach LGAP classes because more students can be in a class, they can hire more generalized educators and it can work across disciplines. But what the Krekler article pointed out was that interest and engagement mattered when it came to learning reading. This article dealt specifically with teaching these in a foreign language context, but the implications of the article were clear for teaching any discipline specific language. Engagement matters. The article suggested four key points for developing curriculum around teaching LSAP courses. First is a Needs Analysis, finding out what students know and what they need to know. Second is a review of the genres within that discipline and the materials that exist in that discipline. What matters at what level, how specific does the instruction need to be, what are the genres of the discipline, articles, charts, narratives, cases studies, abstracts, methods? Third they recommended analyzing the language, what is unique to the discipline, what kind of idioms do they use, what will be familiar to others within the discipline? And lastly to plan, know how to structure units and what strategies to bring in when, make sure there is plenty of discipline specific reading. The author suggests that with these techniques in play, it is possible for a non-expert to teach LSAPs and for experts to be more effective in teaching the languages they use.
When it comes specifically to reading within a science context, another article (Fang & Wei, 2010) discussed the advantages of an inquiry based curriculum infused with reading versus one that did not include explicit reading instruction. The study found a clear advantage not only to reading comprehension when reading strategies were taught regularly (weekly) and implemented with a reading at home program where students got to practice those strategies regularly on science specific text books, but they also had an advantage in scientific knowledge. This article points out that background knowledge, vocab, and reading strategies helped engage students and keep them interested enough to read more and read more effectively. The authors challenged the common notion that science teachers do not text reading and suggest that teaching reading will help their students better understand science.
A last article (Fang 2013) I came across suggested a number of very specific strategies that can be used to teach scientific texts. This article really focused on making things relevant and engaging, which I think is useful for all students of science, whether they are going on to a PhD or just need to be informed as citizens. One suggestion was a book group where students read a book then discuss the content from a variety of different viewpoints, as a historian, or a skeptic, or a translator, of a biographer. These strategies help students think more deeply and interpret the material in meaningful ways. Another suggestion here is to have students learn about specific scientists and science careers, which again helps with context and engagement. The author also suggests intentionally exposing to students to the variety of genres within Scientific literature, like reports, procedures, descriptions, explanations, and expositions.
These articles highlight real world ways to engage students in the academic language of science and move them away from feeling intimidated by academic language, and giving them the tools to possibly learn more intricacies of the languages of science in the future. The bottom line is that Science lies at this unique crossroads and requires education that can cover both the way science seeks to explore the natural world with curiosity and as “a from of discourse that involves the use of language, particularly written language” (Fang & Wei, 2010, p 262). Inquiry is important, but so is the discourse, and science does have to be intentional about teaching both.
In the end I am left wondering whether the sort of hyper specificity of Academic Language is useful. Does it get in the way more than it helps? Will it ever change? I think Al had some great insights on this. He talked about conversations he has had across fields in his job, and about how he encounters other languages pretty regularly. He often has to ask for translations of specific words. He gave me an example about a radiologist who used the term noise to describe some disturbances on an image they were looking at. He remarked about how he had not heard the term used in that way before, but by taking the time to translate it, he was able to identify the issue and offer fairly nuanced suggestions at fixes. He spoke about how science is changing. All the specificity of language was really important as science was defining itself a generation or two ago, as big advances in specific fields were occurring. But he did not feel that that was useful anymore, he said the really interesting work was occurring in the cross pollination of fields, which he acknowledged meant that academic language use would have to break down some so that scientists could speak outside their speciality areas with integrity.
References
Fang, Z (2013). Disciplinary literacy in science: Developing science literacy through trade
books. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57(4), 274-277.
Fang, Z & Wei, Y (2010). Improving middle school students’ science literacy through reading
infusion. The Journal of Educational Research,103, 262-273.
Kerkeler, C (2013). Languages for specific academic purposes or languages for general
academic purposes? A critical reappraisal of a key issue for language provision in higher
education. Language Learning in Higher Education, 3(1), 43-60.