Mastering Academic Language

Abstract

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.

Picture Books as Mentor Texts for 10th Grade Struggling Writers

“…This may be in part because they (a) allow the writer an easier avenue to view the structure of the writing (Ray, 1999), and (b) because the language is often poetic, saturated with metaphors and simple writing (Reif, 1992). Further, picture books present an appealing platform to teach good strategies of writing in an "interesting format" (Dorfman & Capelli, 2009, p.4), and the need to find innovative and strategic pedagogical tools appeal to a diverse student body (Uccelli, Dobbs, & Scott, 2013). Much of the appeal is due to people of all ages having the capacity to enjoy quality picture books (Bishop & Hickman, 1992;Carlisle, 1992b;Jenks, 1992;Ranck-Buhr, 2013;Reif, 1992).…”

The Role of Language Skills in Mid-Adolescents’ Science Summaries

“…Research has also examined if lexico-syntactic skills support WQ. The use of content words has been found to be associated with higher quality in informational texts produced by upper elementary students (Olinghouse & Leaird, 2009) and mean length of clause as contributing to the persuasive WQ of middle schoolers (Beers & Nagy, 2009) and high schoolers (Uccelli, Dobbs, & Scott, 2013). For the most part, research has focused on within-text relations (i.e., features of a text predicting quality of the same text).…”

Using Evidence in L2 Argumentative Writing: A Longitudinal Case Study Across High School and University

“…However, as scholars such as Aull and Lancaster (2014) and Uccelli, Dobbs, and Scott (2013) have noted, the quality and sophistication of evidentials, rather than their frequency, distinguishes writers with greater expertise. As a result, a closer examination of type, function, and reporting verb patterns within evidentials revealed complex trends, particularly over time.…”