Core Academic Language Skills and Practices: Promoting Language Development Through Research-Based Empowering and Critical Learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: Conceptualizing Latino Academic Language: Interdisciplinary Views on Equity, Constructs, and Assessment

Abstract

This presentation examines the potential of the research-based construct Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) to inform pedagogy in a way that promotes language-conscious, meaningful and empowering learning. CALS refers to a constellation of high-utility language skills that correspond to linguistic features prevalent in academic texts across content areas but typically infrequent in most colloquial conversations.

Guided by data from middle school students' performance in the CALS Instrument, researchers and teachers collaboratively designed CALS-focused instructional routines. Using examples of CALS routines that position teachers as language bridges among multiple ways of using language, we will discuss the relevance of:
1. expanding high-utility cross-disciplinary academic language;
2. understanding reading as a collective enterprise;
3. engaging students in critical and reflective language use.

Authors

• Paola Uccelli, Harvard University

• Emily Phillips Galloway, Harvard University

• Melanie Allen, Rafael Hernández School

• Gladys Maria Aguilar, Harvard University