Having just published an article recently that describes a working theory of academic language, and an associated language-based reading curriculum that showed effects on a measure of academic language, I've been thinking a lot about the debates swirling around the history and use of the term, especially because academic language is integrated into so many educational vernaculars. Literally every time I go a school to talk with teachers and administrators about bilingual learners and language development, the term gets used. So here I humbly offer this brief history, associated concerns, and a proposed linguistic shift for thinking about what academic language is and how it could be viewed.

A BRIEF HISTORY
​Most people reading this will be familiar with the term academic language and its history, so I won't waste too much space describing it. But, if you're not familiar, get a little primary source documentation on Jim Cummins' 20th century (i.e., 1979) framing of Basic Interpersonal Communications Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which was later expanded to include context embedded/context reduced and cognitively demanding/cognitively undemanding language dimensions (see below). These theories basically convinced people that CALP was cognitively demanding and context reduced, while social language was cognitively undemanding and context embedded. That is, academic language is better for school, and social language is good only for the playground and the home. 

THEORETICAL & EMPIRICAL CONCERNS
​There is plenty of theoretical and empirical evidence to suggest that the above is simply not the case (e.g., Flores, 2019; Valdés, Capitelli, & Alvarez, 2011).  However, over time, and especially with respect to minoritized bilingual children and youth, academic language has calcified into a nondescript yet global term, where folks can't reliably tell you what academic language is, but they sure can tell you what they think it isn't. And more often than not, the language practices of bilingual and minoritized children and youth are evaluated vis-a-vis a "white listening subject" which Flores & Rosa, 2015 define as white middle class linguistic norms becoming the default stand-in for what counts as academic language. Anything that differs from it is not academic language. Such raciolingustic ideologies around academic language maintain notions of white linguistic supremacy in schools, which is especially problematic because the vast majority (~80%) of teachers in U.S. schools are white, but the majority of children and youth in U.S. schools are Black and Brown, and increasingly speak languages in addition to English (Proctor & Chang-Bacon, in press). 

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS?
In response, there have been recent calls to suspend all use of the academic language because of this troublesome past and present. Flores (2019), for example, recently proposed "language architecture" as a way to describe the linguistic expectations of things like the Common Core State Standards, noting that the same linguistic architecture is often present in the every day linguistic practices of minoritized bilingual children and youth, even though these often get coded as "not academic language". There is also English or Language for Academic Purposes. That can work too (except for the "English" part; see Turner, 2004). Systemic functional Linguistics (Brisk, 2015) also tries to get at a linguistic architecture of sorts, like that described by Flores (though "SFLers" seem to be generally accepting of the term academic language). 

ACADEMIC LANGUAGING & ACADEMIC TRANSLANGUAGING
In my view, one issue that gets overlooked in the academic language debate is that of language modality. To this end, I like theories of 'languaging' and 'translanguaging', which, when it comes to expressive modalities, sees language, and its use, holistically. That is, language is a non-count noun -- there is no plural (i.e., no distinct languages). As such, humans use all their language (singular) for expressive and communicative purposes which varies as a function of context. Relatedly, we now have  translanguaging, which introduces multiple named languages into understanding multilingual languaging (see García & Wei, 2014). Academic language is problematic because it tries to identify a specific, countable language and elevate its status over other countable languages. You see how the two theories (academic language and languaging) are at odds when children and youth are languaging at school, but then are subject to judgement by the white listening subject which wants to hear or read some prescriptive, preconceived version of academic language.

All this to say that 20th century notions of academic language have be expanded. It can't just be about academic versus social language, or context embeddedness and cognitive challenge. To push change, I think it's helpful to learn the troubling history of academic language and reimagine it with just a small morphological tweak: academic language becomes academic languaging. Such a shift might help change mind sets around these strung-together words. In this way, languaging is attached to making sense of school-driven content, and as such gives rise to academic languaging. Applying this to multilingual, or heteroglossic, contexts could be thought of as academic translanguaging. In this framework, the language(s) that students are using to make sense of school-driven content is incidental because as they talk, write, digitally compose, sing, act, etc., they are academic languaging or translanguaging. As long as students are engaging content (which is hopefully itself engaging and meaningful to the students), the linguistic forms are incidental and equitable. 

CONCLUSION
Academic language is a count noun, something that, too often, children and youth have imposed upon them by the white listening subject. Academic languaging is a verb/gerund that gives language back to the student, the language user, and assumes full use of the existing linguistic repertoire deployed in the service of making sense of school-based content.

But that really just addresses expressive language -- speaking, writing, multimodal composing, gaming, etc. Next post will be on reimagining academic language for receptive contexts, particularly focused on reading. 

There is a lot of debate out there about whether "academic language" is a real thing, and how it can oppress because too often the languages of minoritized bilinguals are identified as "not academic language". I agree with this, and think that we ought to be contesting what counts as academic language and who gets to speak it. Perhaps we should just ditch the term. That said, anyone who tells you that you can just use any variety of language you want and still manage to be successful at academic publishing (which is a REAL THING), is either: a) lying to themselves; or b) actively gaslighting you. Every critique of "academic language" I've ever read is always rendered in some formal academic register. So, in the spirit of respecting the debate, but recognizing academic publishing expectations, I offer the following.

Since 2015, I have served as an Action Editor or Editor for three different journals with different audiences: Psycholinguists (Applied Psycholinguistics); speech-language practitioners (Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools); and developmentalists (Child Development). I published a practitioner-focused book on which I served as lead editor, and as of this writing, I am advising 11 outstanding doctoral students, 8 of whom will be defending their dissertations this year or next. In short, for the past 5 years, I have been reading a lot of writing that is designed for academic publication. It is important to acknowledge that academic registers do exist, but their bandwidths can be wide enough that lots of people can find a voice within them. As my editorships wind down, and as my excellent students are finishing their dissertations this year, I've been reflecting on what constitutes successful writing for academic publication. I think things come down to a rather simple notion: Signal versus Noise.

The biggest problem I see, over and over, is people writing for academic publication  fail to get their signal across to the reader because there is too much noise surrounding it. While not exhaustive, 3 key sources of noise have emerged for me as a reader of chapters, journal submissions, and dissertations. I  include #4 below as a low-noise example. It's my hope that this could be useful for examining published academic writing and for your own writing for academic publication.

1) Overuse of infrequent/rare vocabulary. Using terms that are never defined for the reader and do little to nothing to enhance what the author is trying to say induces many eye rolls and groans. For example, "The ontological characteristics of x framework include: a, b, and c"  versus, simply, "The characteristics of x framework include: a, b, and c". If you've established or defined ontology/ontological up front, then maybe go ahead and overuse the word, but using jargony terms because you know what they mean and think they sound "academic" doesn't help. It creates lexical noise for the reader because now they are working to figure out (on their own) how ontology goes with characteristics a, b, and c, and what that means for framework x. It's better to just tell the reader in a straightforward way, so your signal is clear.

2) Unnecessarily complex syntax and morphology. This includes syntax most often characterized by lengthy sentences with multiple clauses that contain more than two ideas. This is problematic primarily because your reader can only hold so much information in short term working memory before it starts to fade. If you write a 5-line sentence that contains 3 different ideas, strung together via commas, colons and/or semi colons, using rare words you haven't defined, the reader cannot hold it all long enough to make sense of it. Shorter sentences that hold one or two ideas at a time allow for better processing an aid construction of a more cohesive argument. This is not to say that syntax can't be complex, or sentences occasionally lengthy. That can be fine, but shouldn't characterize the entirety of your writing. I also join Johnny Saldaña (2014) in strongly believing that "[i[f you put prefixes in parentheses, like (re)search or (de)construction, or separate ’em with slashes like un/conditional or mis/appropriation, you need to bring it down a notch" (p. 979). Overly complex syntax and morphology can be strong sources of noise that obscure signal.

3)  Structure. Headers and sub-headers aren't always necessary, but they can be super-helpful when trying to make an argument, frame an issue, present your method/findings, and/or discuss your results. Well-considered headers and sub-headers serve as an outline. Try extracting just the headers and sub-headers from whatever journal article you're currently crushing on, and see how they serve as guideposts, or structural landmarks, for orienting the reader to the genre in question. When your writing lacks clear structure, the signal is substantially weakened because the reader is trying to make organizational sense of it, which detracts from detecting the signal you are trying to send.

4) Sending a strong signal. Of course it's important that, when the noise is stripped away, the signal is strong. That is, the ideas, the study, the messages you're sending, are relevant, coherent, and worthy of taking up. I don't believe there is a lot of brand-spanking-new ideas out there, but there are strong signals. Raciolinguistics -- the notion that race and language are intertwined with one another -- is a good example. A half-century ago, June Jordan (1972) was writing about raciolinguistics in her chapter called "White English/Black English: The politics of translation", but she didn't use that term. Flores and Rosa (2015) have been successful in harnessing ideas that have been in circulation for quite some time and attaching them to a useful term in raciolinguistics. The term itself has strong signal and little noise: It resonates in the current moment, it's morphologically easy to deconstruct (i.e., you can begin to guess what it means without too much effort), and the writing that defines its details is clear, coherent, and constructive. Flores and Rosa's (2015) article uses complex language, but it is straightforward. Sentences do not meander - they get to the point. They use big terms (e.g., linguistic prescriptivism), but those terms are defined for the reader before they get used in sentences. And as an exercise, try looking at the headers of this article. In so doing, you know what the article is about and then you just need to read for the details. This is just one example. You can do it with most articles where there is a strong signal and little noise. 

Obviously, not everything that gets published meets these criteria. But I do believe that the work that sticks around, that introduces  ideas and research that you remember and want to return to over time, has strong signal and little noise. Writing for academic publication is not just translanguaging all over the place. There are registers in academic publishing: Please recognize this or you won't be successful at it. But we don't have to call it "academic language". More simply, by stripping away noise, you can situate your voice within these academic writing registers, and let your signal come through.

References (full text files linked here)
Flores, N. & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85, 149 - 171. 

Jordan, J. (1972). White English/Black English: The politics of translation. In C. Keller & J.H. Levi (Eds.), We’re on: A June Jordan reader (pp. 1 – 12). Alice James Books. 

Saldaña, J. (2014). Blue-Collar Qualitative Research: A rant. Qualitative Inquiry, 20, 976 - 980. 

​I haven't read it yet (please let it be summer), but the new book by Jamie Schissel called "Social Consequences of Testing for Language-minoritized Bilinguals in the United States" looks really interesting. She, along with others in bilingual studies (e.g., Sánchez, García, & Solorza, 2018) use the term "language-minoritized bilinguals". This is a useful term as it recognizes that some bilingual children, youth, and adults speak a home or dominant language that is minoritized or majoritized, which in turn alters how their bilingualism is viewed and valued by society. While I like this term, it seems to me that is has the unintended effect of reducing bilingual people to language users, which is similar to the criticism often levied against terms like English learner and English language learner, which reduce humans to language learners.

Perhaps a more parsimonious term would just modify the word 'bilingual(ism)'. Thus we get the terms 'minoritized bilingual(ism)' and 'majoritized bilingual(ism)'. Doing this recognizes that, raciolinguistically, bilinguals in the United States face minoritization along lines that move beyond language and into race, as Jonathan Rosa's new book aptly points out. 

I don't lay claim to this terminology as I am sure others have used it, or described it. As always, I have more reading and learning to do, but if we are going to move our understanding of bilingualism further, we need to take an intersectional perspective that is reflected in our lexicons.

As of last Wednesday, I have been promoted to full professor at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development. I was very please to receive the news. This is all part of the ladder structure of academia that is not my favorite thing in the world. However, I am appreciative of the support I've received from students, colleagues, friends, and family. No matter how one feels about these hierarchies in academia, it is a lot of work to go from doctoral student through to full professor. It feels good to have reached this milestone, and I am pleased that I can leverage perhaps some of this privilege to support students and colleagues in pursuit of their goals. En fin, iAdelante!

In October, 2018 I spent a week in Santiago, Chile working with a group of doctoral students from the Universidad Diego Portales and Universidad Alberto Hurtado joint doctoral program. In Chile, they are receiving their first significant waves of non-Spanish-speaking students, primarily comprised of Kreyol-speaking Haitian immigrants. I worked with them, with critical awareness of my own ignorance relative to Kreyol and Haiti, around principles of bilingualism and second language acquisition. I argued that while I could provide some theoretical and empirical insights from my own work, there must be local work that is collaborative and cognizant of the political dimensions of teaching and learning in immigration and bilingual contexts. I gave a talk to these ends, which can be viewed here. Here is the group of outstanding students with whom I was able to work for the week. 

​

It was very gratifying and humbling to be part of the work there. The US experience with immigration, xenophobia, race, and language echoes in Chile, where US imperialism took brutal form with the suspicious death of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 and the Pinochet dictatorship that followed. These overlaps are profound, and the case of Haitian immigration in Chile something that deserves advocacy and documentation. 

Former BC graduate, Catherine Michener, now an assistant professor at Rowan University, just published this article examining how teachers' literacy instructional talk relates to reading outcomes among multilingual learners. Findings suggest that when teachers provide explanations and follow-up on students' interests in the classroom, students' reading performance was affected. Language exposure was achieved by explicit instruction alongside positive reinforcement that encouraged student attention to various learning tasks. 

Read or listen to a story about the need for establishing a pipeline of bilingual teachers in Massachusetts now that the state is poised to bring bilingual education back after 15 years of linguistic prohibition.

​On November 15th, 2017, Massachusetts’s legislators voted to end 15 years of linguistic prohibition and reinstate bilingual education in our public schools. H. 4032: An Act relative to language opportunity for our kids passed by a veto-proof margin and awaits Governor Baker’s signature. If made law, this will be the first time since 2002 that Massachusetts school districts can choose whether to provide bilingual instruction for their students. As a long-time Massachusetts bilingual educator, with ties to the state, universities, schools, and school districts, I greeted this news with a combination of relief, sadness, and hope.
 
It is a relief that school districts will now be able to offer bilingual education if they deem it to be the best approach for their students. This means that a measure of sanity has been restored to the Commonwealth. Fifteen years of forbidding the use of heritage languages in our classrooms, however, has created a profoundly monolingual educational system, which is cause for sadness for those of us who care about social and linguistic justice.
 
Throughout these years, however, there has always been hope. The Framingham Public Schools have cultivated bilingualism and biliteracy through their support of Spanish- and Portuguese-language programming.  In Boston, Cambridge, and Chelsea, Spanish and Mandarin programs continue to thrive despite limited resources for bilingual curricula. The Massachusetts Association for Bilingual Education hosts a school-based annual conference for bilingual educators. Researchers at area universities maintain a focus on how bilingualism can be leveraged to promote literacy achievement. Non-profit organizations promote bilingualism and biliteracy as critical for supporting school and community ties.
 
These stalwart bilingual educators have sustained us over these 15 years, and now we have a new hope. We are faced with a singular, paradoxical moment: the pain of 15 years of free speech repression in K – 12 education, alongside the hope of being able to start over. Here are four things that should be at the forefront of rethinking bilingual education:

1. District language policy. Districts should have a stated language policy that governs the means by which language educational programming decisions are made. This would include the range of language education programs available to English learners, language screening approaches, and the establishment of bilingual parent advisory councils. These approaches could be mandated and monitored by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education;
2. Teacher education. We need a pipeline of bilingual teachers, and we need to provide training to practicing bilingual teachers who need it. Without these educators, there is no bilingual education. Currently, there are no bilingual teacher education programs in Massachusetts. Now, with the English-only era finished, it is likely that more districts will want to implement bilingual programs, which will need to be staffed by trained bilingual teachers. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education must take seriously the need to create regulations for bilingual teacher certification, which was entirely neglected during 15 years of English-only policy;
3. Program Planning. Districts implementing bilingual programs should examine the languages they plan to offer, alongside the lived contexts of the student populations they serve. Linguistically, not all languages function the same. Some, like Spanish, are dominant languages spoken worldwide, with longstanding spoken and written traditions. Others, like Haitian Creole, are spoken in relatively small geographic bands, have a longstanding oral tradition, but a relatively recent written tradition. Some immigrant students have limited or interrupted schooling. Other students are children, born in the U.S., whose immigrant parents hold high status jobs in the worforce. These and other factors must be taken into account in planning bilingual education programming;
4. Including stakekholders. The implementation of bilingual education, at the state, district, and school levels needs to be informed by a host of stakeholders. This includes, but is not limited to school, community, university, and state actors who work together to (bilingually) build an educational system that supports the linguistic plurality of Massachusetts’s K – 12 students.

 
The list is a start point. As of Wednesday, November 15, 2017, the English-only era in Massachusetts is over, and we have the chance to do something unique. It is time to cultivate bilingualism and biliteracy as ends in and of themselves, in the service of broader educational equity in the Commonwealth.

I just had a publication go to press at the Bilingual Research Journal - research that I did in collaboration with Jeff Harring and Rebecca Silverman at the University of Maryland. It's the culminating bilingual literacy study from our first CLAVES (Comprehension, Linguistic Awareness, and Vocabulary in English & Spanish) grant, which ran from 2009 - 2013. It is also the first study I designed from start to finish meant to build on my dissertation research investigating the role of Spanish vocabulary predicting English reading and the distal connections between Spanish oral language and English reading. 

This study takes positions on theory, research, and practice in addressing linguistic interdependence among Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2 - 5. We argue that cross-language associations are likely to vary in part as a function of the construct under study (e.g. syntax vs. lexicon), and as a function of how those constructs get operationalized, or measured. 

We looked at how two Spanish language components (syntax and vocabulary knowledge) predict 5th grade English language (vocabulary, syntax, semantics, morphology) and reading. We also examined whether Spanish language predicted 2nd through 5th development in these constructs. Spanish syntax was predictive of all English outcomes in 5th grade, while Spanish vocabulary was not predictive. Spanish syntax was also associated with growth in English semantics. The point being that it does seem to matter what constructs are used and how they are operationalized from a theoretical and methodological perspective. Instructionally, these relationships are not uni-directional, and the fact that Spanish syntax predicts English has instructional implications for thinking about cross-lingustic comparisons to develop general syntactic knowledge which is an accepted component of most models of reading comprehension.

After 12 years, I am not sure if I'll be doing this kind of work in the future, so here is the .pdf if you are interested. 

I just gave a talk with my colleague Samantha Daley at the American Psychological Association (title above). We addressed issues of digital technologies, literacy development, and bilingualism in the context of increasing ubiquity of digital affordances, and what that means for instruction in the elementary and middle school grades. We targeted 3 dimensions of affordances that digital technologies provide in the current era:

ACCESS
●Supporting learner to access text content accounting for maximum learner variability (e.g., text-to-speech, speech-to-text)
     ○Potential barriers: e.g., visual impairments, decoding challenges
     ○Leveraging existing capabilities: e.g., alternative modalities
PROCESSING
●Getting the learner to metacognitively process language and literacy to better understand their relation to learning and comprehension (e.g., embedded vocabulary supports or comprehension strategy applications)
     ○Potential barriers: e.g., emergent English proficiency
     ○Leveraging existing knowledge: e.g., native language proficiency
INTERNALIZATION
●Getting the learner to internalize learning, to feel expert and engaged in the content (e.g., motivation, self-efficacy)
     ○Potential barriers: e.g., limited reading proficiency
     ○Leveraging existing knowledge: e.g., high-interests texts 

Our powerpoint is here. The video will be posted soon on the APA website.