Explicit Instruction in the Language of School: A Pilot Study of an Academic Language Unit

• In Event: Poster Session 5
  In Poster Session: Vocabulary Research and Instruction

Abstract

Academic language is an important component of school success, and recent research links academic language to key skills such as reading comprehension and writing. There have been many calls for explicit teaching of this register. This is a study of the implementation of a pilot instructional unit about the elements of the academic register and how/why individuals might choose to use it. Qualitative analysis of student discourse throughout and following the unit, as well as artifact analysis from the classroom, reveals that students learned to identify new elements of academic language by the end of the unit, and they described complexities in deciding to use the academic register in front of classmates.

Authors

• Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University

• Emily Phillips Galloway, Harvard University