Reporting verbs (RVs) are commonly used features in academic texts. While college textbook authors are less likely to be transparent about their views, they frequently employ RVs to signal their attitudes about the claims and findings of others. University students, particularly those placed in transitional reading courses, however, may have…

A still-widespread perspective on "academic language" is that the most important dimension of language used for academic purposes is the extent to which its linguistic features contrast with "everyday language" used outside of school. But focusing on the unique linguistic features of written academic texts ignores the important…

This article focuses on how Grade 6 students interactionally make meaning out of subject-related language encountered in civics textbook material by searching for synonyms and engaging in discussions. Employing ethnographically-inspired methods, data was collected through observations and audio recordings of civics teaching in two linguistically…

This book presents the results of research that focused on international students receiving writing instruction on a US university campus. It explores how the students developed their foreign-student identities and their own ways of grappling with the unique issues they encountered as they worked to improve their academic literacy skills. The book…

Despite burgeoning research on translanguaging in education, research on translanguaging approaches to literacy education has lagged behind that of research on oral translanguaging in education. Hence, this article investigates what translanguaging strategies six multilingual newly arrived students used in the production of an academic text, and…

A growing body of research has focused on Black and Latino males in community colleges, but the research has stopped short of exploring how they experience the academic language of the community college. The purpose of this qualitative, narrative study was to explore the stories of Black and Latino males at a community college in Maryland to…

The notion of language proficiency in English Language Teaching (ELT), as an internationalized educational enterprise, has tended to be operationalized in terms of stable lexicogrammar and enduring normative patterns of social use. It will be argued that this 'established' stability has been challenged by the scholarship in several fields of…

This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic…

This phenomenological study research presents an option to use both discourse in the native language and technology as an alternative to improve the understanding of mathematics in secondary education. 13 students whose native language is Spanish attended a high school in a large urban school district in the Southwest of the United States,…

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized…

This exploratory sociolinguistic study examined D/discourses and writing modes in a Grade 10 English literature classroom wherein students answered literature-based questions by means of both traditional and new literacies approaches. Studies conducted at the intersection of classroom instruction and online affinity spaces are still surprisingly…

Research on academic socialization has predominately focused on the L2 educational experiences of international students. While foreign language (FL) research has explored "multiliteracies" and "intercultural learning," literacy in a FL continues to be understood as the use of foreign words and grammar combined with culturally…

The construct of academic language--while of great interest, in part, because of recently adopted or revised content and English-language development (ELD) standards that explicitly focus on academic language--and its role in the academic success of all students, including young learners and English learners (ELs), is far from clearly understood.…

The definitions of "academic language" available to teachers and teacher educators often invoke generalized assumptions about the supposed gap between complex, discipline-specific forms of language and the everyday language of Latina/o/x students. In this article, we advance an alternative hypothesis -- that Latina/o/x students boast…

Drawing on the notion of biliteracy as the "the conjunction of literacy and bilingualism," this article reports on multiple ongoing case studies of multilingual university students developing academic literacies simultaneously in French and English. Interview data and textual and video records of students' writing practices were used to…