The Challenge of Academic Language

Increasingly in recent years, educators have related worries about students’ literacy accomplishments to their lack of “academic language skills” (August & Shanahan, 2006; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Pilgreen, 2006; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002). Indeed, it seems clear that control over academic language is a requirement for success with challenging literacy tasks, such as reading textbooks or writing research papers and literature reviews. As early as the middleelementary grades, students are expected to learn new information from contentarea texts, so failure to understand the academic language of those texts can be a serious obstacle in their accessing information. Accountability assessments requiring written…