The Special Demands of Academic LanguageCharles Temple, Ph.D.Hobart & William Smith Colleges

For the Literacy in Developing Countries Special Interest Group NewsletterDecember 30, 2015

Many of the literacy projects I’ve worked with in Africa have shared the aims of developing children’s reading fluency and comprehension. They addressed fluency by providing child-friendly and engaging trade books in local languages, and also showing teachers creative rereading activities. They addressed comprehension by following constructivist strategies, like asking children what they know about a topic and eliciting questions from them, guiding their inquiry as they read to seek answers, and following up the reading with discussions and other strategies to drive the meaning home. These projects have had a friendly relationship with EGRA and EGRA-inspired initiatives, leaving it to them to develop children’s more basic skills like phonological awareness and phonics.

My faith in the projects I just described dimmed just a bit last month, though, on a visit to a rural primary school outside Kumasi, Ghana. Here’s the scenario. The teacher is doing a KWL (Know-Want to Know-Learn) activity, using a textbook text about the water cycle. When he asks students what they know about water, they say, “It’s wet.” “We swim in it.” “We drink it.” “Sometimes it’s dirty.” When he asks them what they want to know about water, they ask “How can we make it clean?” and (here comes my favorite--) “Why can’t water walk?” Now it’s time to read the text. The teacher apologizes to the project trainer and me because he will have to read the text and explain it to the students, because they won’t understand it otherwise. I look at the text and realize he’s probably right. The text says something like (the following is from memory):

The Water Cycle

Water is converted into vapour through the processes of evaporation from streams, lakes, and oceans; respiration from animals and humans; and transpiration from plants. The vapour rises into the atmosphere where cooler temperatures cause the process of condensation, resulting in the formation of clouds and eventually in precipitation, by means of which water returns to the surface of the earth.

One thing I notice about the textbooks in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa is that compared to our textbooks in North America they are short, and use highly condensed language to cover their topics. But the problem would be the same to some extent in any science or social studies textbook. Content area textbooks use language that can differ starkly from the language of stories, or from the spoken language of native speakers. To illustrate some of these differences, I invite you to examine a passage from a fifth grade Ghanaian science textbook (this one is actual--not from memory):

Light Energy

Our main source of light energy is the sun. Light energy can be produced by electric bulbs, lighted candles, hurricane lamps, and glowing torches.

Light energy enables us to see.

Light energy is also used by plants to make their food. Without sunlight

plants will die and animals that feed on plants will also die. Light energy is, therefore, very important to living things.

Electrical Energy

Electrical energy is obtained from electricity, batteries, and electrical generators. We use electrical energy to run many domestic appliances such as electric lamps, radios, fans, televisions, refrigerators, and irons. Electrical energy is also used in factories for the manufacture of various products.

This passage is riddled with examples of academic English: words, phrases, and sentence structures that are found exclusively in written academic texts and almost never heard in everyday speech. A student can be a competent speaker of English and a capable reader of stories, and still be baffled when it comes time to make sense of written academic English. Some of the main challenges of academic English are these:

1) Nominalizations. Words like manufacture in this text (as in “the manufacture of various products”), or transpiration, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation that were used in the P5 lesson I observed, take a complicated activity or process and sum it up in a single word. Such words take unpacking and explaining for students to understand them.

2) The Passive Voice. Sentences like “Electrical energy is obtained from electricity…” are structured very differently from the Subject—Verb—Object sentences we normally use in speech.

3) Cohesive Devices. Academic texts use certain phrases to signal the relationships between ideas. The word therefore in “Light energy is, therefore, very important to living things” tells readers that for the reasons mentioned earlier the result mentioned next should follow. The phrase such as in “We use electrical energy to run many domestic appliances such as electric lamps, radios, fans…” signals that electric lamps, radios, fans are examples of domestic appliances.

4) Technical Terms. Words like light energy and electrical generators, as well as transpiration, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, are special terms that we normally use in the domain of science.

5) Non-Technical “Tier Two Words.” Terms such as enables, obtained, domestic, appliances, various, and products are not specialized science terms, but they are rarely used in everyday speech.

How will students be able to navigate these challenges? The constructivist strategies the fifth grade teacher was using were not fully up to the job. And the many colorful children’s storybooks the project had provided these children, written in both the local language Twi and in English, don’t offer much of a ramp up to the demands of academic language, either.

These things matter, because although they are initially taught in home languages, students in Ghana need to understand written academic English in order to pass school leaving examinations

out of primary school. And they will need it in order to thrive in secondary school. The same is true in Tanzania, where the language of schooling shifts from Kiswahili to English in secondary school. In most (or all?) countries in Africa secondary and tertiary education is conducted in a European language—English, French, or Portuguese. There are robust trends to conduct primary education in children’s home languages. There are strong grounds for home language education, certainly. But for those students who will continue their education, there is a need to help them not only make the transition to a European language, but to an academic register.