Academic Language in Second Language Learning

Language in academic settings, also referred to academic language, has gained attentionin the field of second language learning owing to new understandings of the complexitiesof language inherent in learning academic content, and new efforts to assessEnglish learners' language proficiency in the context of school learning. The conceptof academic language as distinct from social language has been in the academic literaturesince the mid-1950s, and surfaced as a major construct in the field of bilingualeducation in the 1980s. Many readers will be familiar with the ideas of BICS andCALP, first introduced by Jim Cummins in the 1980s. This book presents a critique ofacademic language as a separable construct from social language, and introduces currentresearch efforts to understand how English learners interact, interpret, and showunderstanding of language in academic contexts in ways that re-think and go beyondthe distinction between social and academic language.The book is organized into three main sections, each with a range of chapters that consider how academic language playsinto how children and youth learn academic content as emergent bilingual students in school settings. A Foreward andAfterward offer commentary on the book and its contents. The intended audience for this book is graduate students, teachereducators, and researchers interested in issues of language and content learning for English learners, the new mainstream ofschools across the nation. There is something for a wide range of readers and students of second language acquisition inthis volume.