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E. Thrmann, 25/09/2013

The Role of Languages in Learning and teaching School Subjects

1. Why language matters and which kind of language is at stake?

It is fascinating to see how in recent years educational experts around the globe have started to focus on the language dimension when it comes for schools to meet the demands of modern knowledge societies. Empirical results from large-scale international comparative studies (e.g. PISA, PIRLS, TIMSS) have demonstrated beyond doubt that in many countries educational systems fall short of providing learning opportunities for all students to acquire, share and use knowledge for their own future well-being and for the ability to participate in public life. Especially students who come from families with a migrant and/or below average educational background are often found to lack opportunities for attaining the PISA competence level 2 in reading comprehension, Sciences and / or Mathematics which is considered to be a conditio sine qua non for successful vocational training, competing on the labour market, and active participation in public life.

In the past, in many national contexts, school teachers based their daily routines on three assumptions of normality: (a) society wants only a smaller proportion of a student cohort to qualify for professional (academic) careers, (b) students are competent native speakers of the dominant language of schooling, and (c) they are used to the schools particular patterns of language use since in their families reading and writing is a major concern. Based on these three points of departure schools delegated responsibility for language development to the specialists, i.e. teachers of language (L1) as a subject and to teachers of classical and modern languages (L2). The teaching of other subjects, however, focussed on subject-specific content and expected students to be able to face the linguistic challenges of subject teaching if not, they simply did not qualify for academic advancement. Although this pedagogic division of language labour in school education is outdated because of various demographic and socio-cultural reasons, it has become a habitus in Bourdieus meaning of the term (cf. Gogolin 1994) and is still highly influential concerning deep rooted daily content[footnoteRef:1] teaching routines. On the other hand, experts have come to the conclusion that mastering the language of schooling is a key to successful learning across the curriculum and the most reliable track to school success and elevated socio-economic status after graduating from school. They have also made it quite clear that school is a discourse community with its own ways and means to use language as a medium or tool for making meaning, i.e. teaching and learning content across the curriculum. Thus, one of the major aims of the Council of Europes project Languages in Education, Languages for Education is to devise and support strategies and actions to battle the outdated Taylorism of language education in our school systems to such an extent that language awareness becomes a matter of course in content teaching across the curriculum. Following the concern of experts worldwide for the specific patterns of language use in school education, the leading question for this conference is What have we done so far and what can we do in the near future to support schools in developing and implementing whole-school policies of inclusive academic[footnoteRef:2] language education? [1: In this presentation, content as in content teaching is used as a short formula referring to declarative as well as procedural knowledge taught and learnt in so-called non-language subjects (German: Sachfcher).] [2: In this presentation, the term academic as in academic language refers to the context of schools with an emphasis on the secondary level (10/11 15 year old students), i.e. a period in education with a broad range of different subjects.]

However, things get rather complicated when we take a closer look at the language patterns which are considered characteristic of teaching and learning in formal education. What exactly is academic language? What are the elements, patterns, strategies and rules for language use in classroom interaction, textbooks, and exams? And even more important and crucial how can we actively help so-called vulnerable groups to cope with this particular register?

To understand the cognitive and language challenges of modern competence-based school education lets have a closer look at an example from the Geography classroom. Students are asked to take up the role of a meteorological expert and to explain on a mock radio interview how hurricanes build up, what makes them so strong and what happens inside and outside a hurricane. They are supposed to do this on the basis of the two diagrams below and results from their own web quests.

http://www.weatherwizkids.com/Hurricane_formation.gif

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/138612main_okelley_graph_lg.jpg

First, students have to understand the assignment, they must decode information from verbal as well as visual forms of representation including the technical terms of the discipline (e.g. stratosphere, evaporation), they have to apply higher order thinking skills such as hypothesise and conclude in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the hurricane mechanisms, then consider the type (genre) of the target text (radio interview) and what potential listeners might (want to) know about hurricanes, and, finally, come up with coherent meaningful and media-adequate oral speech. What a challenge especially for those students who are not exposed to such language and thought patterns at home and among their friends.

The example might show that the functions of language are manifold. In the context of teaching foreign and second languages we are used to consider language as a medium for everyday and often fairly trivial communicative activities. We are also well aware of its function for retrieving information from all sorts of verbal sources. However, in the context of teaching and learning content in subject areas such as Mathematics, History, Social Sciences, Physics and even Art and Music there are more reasons why language matters:

Language as a constituent component of higher-order thinking skills and a necessary precondition for successful content learning: There is little doubt that successful learning in most school subjects strongly depends on the availability of higher-order thinking skills. To demonstrate how thinking skills are linked to language, I shall take advantage of a poster a Canadian school library technician (Enokson) developed for the English language arts and social studies departments (humanities) to use in their classroom, as well as in the library:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vblibrary/4576825411/sizes/l/in/pool-27724923@N00/

This example clearly shows how the language side of learning activities relate to cognitive operations and skills. Also a closer look at the highly influential Anderson/Krathwohl (2001) update of Blooms taxonomy confirms the symbiosis of verbal and cognitive activities for teaching and learning in formal education. They are two sides of the same medal you cannot have content without language and vice versa.

Language as a tool for making meaning: Many of the approaches to the language dimension of content teaching are based on social-constructivist concepts of learning and the original ideas of the developmental psychologists Vygotsky and Bruner. Vygotsky claimed that young children develop higher order thinking skills through cultural mediation and interpersonal communication with more knowledgeable adults or peers, which means that the development of mental concepts and the appropriation of procedural knowledge depend on social interaction and verbal exchange. Thus, without adequate language means and strategies which are geared to formal education learners cannot be expected to take advantage of opportunities schools normally offer.

Language as a filter for assessing learning outcomes: Formal assessment procedures in school subjects heavily rely on open- or half-open-formatted tasks and on oral or written presentations by the student how s/he has solved the task. What makes matters even more complicated is the fact that in high stake assessment the academic register determines the characteristics of the verbal filter. In plain words: If students do not have an age-adequate command of subject literacy they have no chance to meet the (very often) implicit expectations by the teacher as a subject specialist who claims to be primarily concerned with content. If one would choose to reduce the language load of assessment tasks by resorting to closed-formatted items such as multiple-choice, matching or fill-in formats, one would seriously delay the development of subject literacy.

So, language really does matter not only in the language classroom, but across the whole curriculum. This should lead us back to the question: What exactly is academic language, and how can we approach it in content teaching?

On a relatively high level of abstractness experts seem to agree how academic language use can be conceptualised by a set of features such as

distanced decontextualised dispassionate exact objective complex highly structured complete unambiguous explicit.

amounting to a way of language use which we normally find in content-focussed writing. This style of projecting ideas into words and texts is also expected by the academic discourse community for oral classroom communication especially when learning results are presented, discussed and achievement is being assessed.

Below this level consensus on a definition what academic language is by identifying e