Transcript
I think we need to keep in mind a couple of things: one, theres a big difference between conversation fluency language and academic language skills. Students may fairly quickly pick up conversational fluency because they're hearing it in the environment, they're hearing it from other children in the classroom their getting exposure from teachers, so they may sound like native speakers fairly quickly. Within a year or two, most English language learners coming into an English speaking school environment are pretty fluent in English, but that doesn't mean they've caught up in all aspects of English because academic aspects of the language are quite different. And we're talking about the language of books, we're talking about the language of content matter and the vocabulary tends to be much lower frequency then the vocabulary of everyday interactions. Teachers need to know how to support students in gaining access to this kind of language.
When we talk about English, we're talking about a hybrid language. We're talking about language that's very different in the way we use it in conversation as opposed to the kind of language that is required in schools.
In conversation context, they're face to face; there are a lot of cues to the meaning that are available when we talk face to face to people. For example, there's eye contact, there's facial expressions, there's intonations, there's the concrete contexts, all of those aspects of the communicative situation help convey the meaning. But when we're talking about academic situations, often we're talking about the kind of language that's used in classrooms and the language of books where those interpersonal cues are less salient. When we're reading text from a book the language is often quite different then the language we use in everyday communication. And there aren't the same kinds of cues we have in face-to-face situations. That's why getting students in engaged with literacy is extremely important in terms of their acquisition of this very different academic language.
