Learning Academic Language, Comprehending Text

This chapter addresses the question: What teaching practices support the development of academic language for text comprehension? After defining academic language with the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework, this chapter organizes the academic language instruction research by two broad targets for instruction and intervention. The instructional research spans work with individual academic vocabulary words to the discourse patterns and academic habits that support students’ participation and success in school. This broader set of language and literacy skills is most often recognized as academic literacy. Within extant research, instructional targets generally fall into two expansive, overlapping categories: academic vocabulary and academic literacy. This chapter synthesizes the instructional research targeting academic vocabulary and academic literacy and its impacts on comprehension. There are many promising findings and some clear trends, but there are gaps in the literature. To address these gaps in the literature, we address the roles of teacher knowledge and professional learning in academic language instruction. Finally, we present critiques of academic language that are rooted in awareness of deficit models. In reviewing these critiques, we offer a nuanced and pragmatic view for bringing seemingly divergent lines of inquiry together.