Читать книгу Language Power - Margo Gottlieb - Страница 9

Academic language has caught the attention of the educational community because of its positive link to academic success (Friedberg, Mitchell, & Brooke, 2016). There is a substantial body of literature on academic language, from theoretical frameworks (Bailey & Butler, 2007; Cummins, 1981; Gottlieb, 2003; Scarcella, 2003; Zacarian, 2012), to research reviews (Anstrom et al., 2010; de Oliveira, 2013; Snow & Uccelli, 2009) to instructional approaches (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994; Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2017). Recently, academic language has been recognized in standards, for content, including college and career readiness standards (de Oliveira, 2016), language development standards (WIDA, 2012), and both sets of standards (Gottlieb & Ernst-Slavit, 2014a). Additionally, we have witnessed the grounding of academic language curriculum design as enacted in standards-referenced classrooms (Gottlieb & Ernst-Slavit, 2013, 2014b; Zwiers, 2014).

Given the growing body of literature on academic language, we wished to create an easy-to-read guide that consolidates the complexities of language learning into practical ideas from a range of perspectives. With that backdrop in mind, we wrote this book around three main purposes:

1 To highlight the critical role of academic language use in a variety of contexts tied to teaching and learning

2 To present a conceptual tool—DARE—to facilitate students’ and teachers’ academic language use within and across the disciplines or content areas

3 To offer educators language-centered resources to add to their instructional and assessment repertoires

It is our intent to ensure that every teacher has an understanding of the importance of academic language use in their craft, no matter who their students are and what their discipline is. We feel confident that this goal can be accomplished, as we have distilled the literature, combed instructional materials, analyzed standards, and had deep conversations with our colleagues over multiple years. These experiences have been integral to the creation of teacher tools related to academic language use, including Can Do Descriptors, Key Uses Edition, and los descriptores Podemos (see multiple entries of WIDA at the end of this section).