DANIELA ALEJANDRA VASQUEZ DIAZ

5° Semestre

The Challenge of Academic language

At present, as in recent years, there has been great concern regarding the literacy
results obtained by students, associating this factor with their lack of language skills.
Academic language is considered as the language that reflects schooling, the language
of education, the scientific language, among others, due to refined use for writing and
speaking, thus being valued as the language used in school, in writing, in public and in
formal language. In this way, it is to be expected that in the elementary and middle
grades students will learn new information from the texts of the areas, so the lack of
understanding of these texts can become serious obstacles to accessing information.
Despite the number of involvements with the term "academic language" and the general
concern about its inappropriate development is that there is no simple definition of what
academic language is.
According to Chamot and O'Malley, academic language is defined as the language
used by teachers and students with the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills,
describing abstract ideas and developing conceptual understanding of students. But
while it is important to find contexts of use and purpose, it is also important to be right
about three dimensions that Scarcella says are required for mastery of academic
language, such as the linguistic, cognitive and sociocultural and psychological
dimension since academic language can not only be used for access to new information
but must be also used to interact on a topic with others and have the ability to impart the
information. A more theory-based approach that has contributed on a central way to our
understanding of language in general and academic language in particular, is
Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which studies language in its social context,
understanding the language as a form and result of social circumstances, finding in this
way that there is no single academic language j ust as there is no single British English,
but rather a variety that share basic characteristics and that evolves continuously as the
sciences evolve and the disciplines. In this way, on the assumption that language can
be more or less academic, we have no basess for any indication that qualifies it as
such.