Despite a longstanding awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic language proficiency construct, Core Academic Language Skills (CALS). CALS refers to a constellation of high-utility language skills hypothesized to support reading comprehension across school content areas.Using the CALS-I, a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative instrument, we first examined the variability in students' CALS by grade, English proficiency designation, and socioeconomic status (SES). Then, we examined the contribution of CALS to reading comprehension using academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic factors as covariates. A linguistically and socioeconomically diverse crosssectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (GMRT), an academic vocabulary test (VAT), and a word reading fluency test (TOSWRF). GLM analysis of variance revealed that CALS differed significantly by grade, English proficiency designation, and SES, with students in higher grades, English proficient students, and those from higher SES backgrounds displaying higher scores, on average. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified CALS as an independent predictor of reading comprehension, even after controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and socio-demographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of schoolrelevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators.

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that co-occur with school learning tasks across disciplines. Using an innovative instrument, we explored CALS in a cross-sectional sample of 235 students in Grades 4-8. The results revealed between-and within-grade variability in CALS. Psychometric analyses yielded strong reliability and supported the presence of a single CALS factor, which was

The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Paola Uccelli studies socio-cultural and individual differences in early language development and in academic literacy. With a background in linguistics, she explores how different language skills (at the lexical, grammatical, and discourse levels) interact with each other to either promote or hinder advances in language expression and comprehension. She is particularly interested in the challenges and possibilities faced by struggling students as they try to learn the academic discourse valued at school. Her current research addresses questions such as how struggling students expand their academic vocabulary and how they learn to use a variety of discourse structures flexibly and conventionally for diverse communicative purposes. Acknowledgements:This research was possible thanks to the support of the Milton Grant, Harvard University. First, we want to thank our co-Principal Investigator, Nancy Sommers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We also thank Suzanne Lane, from MIT, for sharing her expertise and leading the wholistic scoring training workshop; Rose Wongsarnpigoon and, Jin Kyoung (Ani) Hwang for their careful CLAN transcriptions; Sabina Neugebauer for her support at the earliest phases of this project; the high school teachers who scored the essays; and, of course, the students, teachers and principal who made this study possible. LANGUAGE OF ACADEMIC WRITING 2 Abstract (144 words)Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically-useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents' writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern U.S. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers; transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures; and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays' writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker, i.e., epistemic hedges, significantly predicted persuasive essays' writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically-informative assessment tools.

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Secondary teachers nationwide are encouraged by the Common Core State Standards and recent research to enact disciplinary literacy instruction. However, little is known about how teachers make sense of teaching disciplinary literacy skills to adolescents. To what extent might adolescents still need the kinds of foundational support provided by what Shanahan and Shanahan called intermediate strategy instruction, or instruction in general reading comprehension strategies? In this article, the authors describe findings from a disciplinary literacy project in which a group of high school social studies teachers (and the authors) discovered that a complex layering of intermediate and disciplinary literacy work was required to meet students’ needs. Implications for teams of teachers wishing to explore this tension and keep their focus on helping students access and communicate content material are shared.