Reading and Writing (2020) 33:97–119

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-09937-8

Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational

writing

Zhihui Fang1,2 · Jungyoung Park1

Published online: 29 January 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
Academic language is a kind of social language for the purpose of schooling. It is
central to disciplinary learning, thinking, and communication. This study examined
adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing, a genre highly val-
ued in school, workplace, and society. Ninety-three seventh and ninth grade students
from a U.S. public school were asked to write a science report based on a “wordless”
picture book about a familiar class of animals called crocodylia. The student writing
corpus was coded for presence of a constellation of academic language features. Sta-
tistical analyses of these data showed that (a) the adolescents made limited use of
academic language features in their writing, (b) there were no significant differences
between the two grade levels in academic language use, (c) there was a significant
relationship between reading ability and academic language use, and (d) academic
language use was a significant predictor of writing quality. These findings highlight
both the importance of and the need for more explicit attention to academic lan-
guage in secondary literacy instruction.

Keywords  Academic language · Informational writing · Literacy instruction ·

Disciplinary learning · Adolescent literacy · Language and literacy development

Introduction

Academic language is, broadly speaking, a kind of social language for the pur-
pose of doing school work. It is the language through which students build con-
tent knowledge, develop advanced literacy, acquire disciplinary habits of mind, and
are assessed in their learning. This language has lexical, grammatical, and discur-
sive features that are distinct from those that characterize the everyday language

* Zhihui Fang
zfang@coe.ufl.edu
1
School of Teaching and Learning, University of Florida, 2423 Norman Hall, Gainesville,
FL 32611‑7048, USA
2
Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China

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 98 Z. Fang, J. Park

students use to socialize with peer friends and family members. Because of this,
academic language tends to be less familiar and more challenging to students, who
are expected to learn content along with the language through which this content
is presented. This article reports on a study that examined adolescents’ use of aca-
demic language in informational writing, a type of nonfiction whose primary pur-
pose is to classify, describe, explain, analyze, or argue (Derewianka, 1990). Infor-
mational writing is a genre highly valued in school, workplace, and society. As such,
it is emphasized in both state and national standards. The U.S. Common Core State
Standards (www.cores​tanda​rds.org), for example, recommends that students be
given a steadily increasing dose of informational text in their literacy diets over their
K-12 experience. They are expected to not only interact with an increasingly higher
percentage of informational text (50% for 4th graders, 55% for 8th graders, and 70%
for 12 graders) but also develop proficiency in reading and writing these texts. Like
any genre, informational text is constructed with lexical, grammatical, and discur-
sive resources that are functional for making it the type of text it is. Understanding
what these academic language resources are and how they are used to instantiate the
genre is key to developing proficiency in informational writing. This study describes
the linguistic resources that adolescents use in constructing and communicating
their understanding about the natural world. Before describing the study, we review
relevant research literature on the conception of academic language and discuss the
role of academic language in literacy development and disciplinary learning in K-12
contexts.

Defining and describing academic language

Academic language is commonly understood to be a set of registers for the purpose

of teaching, learning, and assessment in school. It has certain features that do not
regularly occur in the discourses used in everyday spontaneous social interactions
among close friends and family members. Three lines of scholarship have contrib-
uted to the conception of academic language and the identification of its features.
The first line of scholarship is the sociolinguistic work of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g.,
Bernstein, 1971/2003; Hasan, 1989/2009; Heath, 1983). This line of research dem-
onstrates that people from different social strata are oriented towards different ways
of saying and meaning and that this difference in coding orientation impacts chil-
dren’s academic performance in school. More specifically, middle class children
come to school with a set of linguistic skills (e.g., labeling and naming features,
providing narratives on items out of immediate physical context) and literacy expe-
riences (e.g., extensive exposure to stories and imaginative talks) that teachers value
and are reinforced in school but that working class children have yet to acquire. This
semantic variation prepares children differentially for school success.
The distinction between school-based, or academic, language and home-based,
or everyday, language was brought to the forefront of educators’ conscious attention
in the second line of scholarship. The work of Jim Cummins, a professor of bilin-
gual education in Canada, deserves special mention here. In discussing assessment
issues involving bilingual learners, Cummins (1984) proposed a distinction between

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 99

what he called “Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills” (BICS) and “Cognitive

Academic Language Proficiency” (CALP), with the former referring to the language
used for everyday spontaneous social interactions and the latter to the language
needed for school learning. He noted that because the time needed for developing
CALP, or academic language, is significantly longer (5–7 years) than that for devel-
oping BICS, or everyday language (6–24 months), educators should be careful not
to conflate the two registers when designing language assessment tasks.
Building on Cummins’ work, Bailey and Heritage (2008) divided academic lan-
guage into School Navigational Language (SNL) and Curriculum Content Language
(CCL). SNL refers to the language through which students communicate with peers
and teachers in school, and CCL refers to the language used in the process of teach-
ing and learning content materials. The two varieties differ in their purpose, degree
of formality, context of use, teacher expectations, and grade level expectations. A
similar distinction was made by Bunch (2014), who introduced the notions of “lan-
guage of display” and “language of ideas” to show that there is more than one style
of language use in the classroom. Language of display refers to “the evolving oral
and written texts students develop, either individually or as a group, to present to
particular academic audiences”, and language of ideas consists of “the use of any
and all linguistic resources students bring to bear on the engagement in and comple-
tion of an academic task” (p. 74). The distinction, while not perfect, serves to high-
light the fact that children use language in different ways for different audiences and
purposes as they engage productively with different academic tasks (e.g., discuss-
ing a novel, writing a lab report) in classroom settings. Nagy and Townsend (2012)
offered a more focused definition, referring to academic language as “the specialized
language, both oral and written, of academic settings that facilitates communication
and thinking about disciplinary content” (p. 92). They noted that academic language
is used to convey educational and disciplinary knowledge, value and reasoning in
ways not commonly found in students’ everyday lifeworld. Academic language can
be discipline-specific or cross disciplinary, with the former denoting the language
that encapsulates core concepts and key relationships unique to specific disciplines
and the latter to the language prevalent across disciplines.
Although a general distinction is now widely accepted between the language
that is functional for doing school work (i.e., academic language) and the language
used primarily for daily social interactions (i.e., everyday language), the boundary
between the two registers appears to be less clear to many. In fact, some even ques-
tioned the existence of academic language as a legitimate linguistic entity. O’Connor
and Michaels (2015), for example, asserted that there is “no definitive” structural or
functional boundary between academic language and everyday language (p. 304).
Other scholars have been able to describe the features of academic language, how-
ever. This strand of research suggests that although the line between academic lan-
guage and every language can be blurry at times, there is a constellation of lexi-
cal, grammatical, and discursive features that contributes to a syndrome commonly
recognized as academic language. For example, the landmark study by Biber and
Gray (2016) revealed that academic language is characterized by an extensive use
of embedded phrasal structures (e.g., expanded noun phrases with pre- and post-
modifiers), whereas everyday language relies heavily on clausal features (e.g.,

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 100 Z. Fang, J. Park

finite dependent clauses). According to Bailey (2007), the key difference between
academic language and everyday language resides not so much in their linguistic
complexity or cognitive demands, but in the co-patterning of certain lexical, gram-
matical, and discursive features. Lexically, academic language makes greater use of
general academic vocabulary and specialized terminology. Grammatically, passive
voice constructions, relative clauses, conditional clauses, and long noun phrases are
more often associated with academic language. Discursively, academic language
involves the use of school-valued organizational patterns and participation structures
associated with genre/discipline-specific practices (e.g., writing a report about a sci-
ence experiment) and general academic discourse practices (e.g., making evidence-
based arguments). While many of these linguistic features can indeed be found in
everyday language, they tend to co-occur with greater frequency and higher concen-
tration in academic discourses.
Drawing on the insights from corpus studies and discourse analytic studies of
pedagogical texts, Schleppegrell (2001) identified a set of linguistic features that
characterizes the language used in academic, particularly reading and writing, tasks.
Specifically, she showed that in contrast to everyday spoken discourse, school-based
texts tend to make more concentrated use of specific, technical vocabulary (e.g.,
aldehydes); dense noun phrases with pre- and post-modifiers (e.g., this effect of
Earth’s rotation on the direction of winds and currents); declarative sentences with
embedded clauses (e.g., Aldehydes are organic compounds in which the carbonyl
group is attached to a carbon atom at the end of a carbon-atom chain.); logical links
indicated through the use of nouns, verbs, prepositions, clauses, and conjunctions
(e.g., With no jaguars to eat them, the number of anteaters might increase. Alarmed
by the fire and the destruction it caused, people in Ohio began a massive campaign
to clean up the Cuyahoga.); and a tightly knit texture indicated through nominal,
verbal and adverbial expressions (e.g., During combustion, the carbon and hydro-
gen combine with oxygen in the air to form carbon dioxide and water. This process
releases energy in the forms of heat and light.). These features help realize “contexts
of information display, authoritativeness, and high degrees of structure” (Schleppe-
grell, 2004, p. 74) and are functional for creating the sort of texts that are valued in
school and that students are expected to read and write for the purpose of schooling.
Academic language features are not equally distributed across all texts, how-
ever. Instead, they configure, in particular ways, with other lexicogrammatical (or
semiotic) resources to meet the needs of particular disciplines, purposes, tasks, and
audiences. This means that academic language is not a unitary or stable construct.
It manifests differently across different contexts, as each task, genre, discipline, or
grade level has its own expected ways of using language. Biber and Gray (2016)
found that there is considerable internal lexicogrammatical variation across disci-
plines and registers, with scientific writing, for example, exhibiting extreme reli-
ance on phrasal structure and writing in the humanities relying more heavily on
clausal modification. As Hyland (2004) explained, texts within the same academic
discipline tend to display similar “preferences for particular argument forms, lexi-
cal choices and discourse structures” because they adopt similar approaches and
address “similar questions about a similarly conceived external world” (p. 177).
Schleppegrell (2004) showed that different school-based genres—personal (e.g.,

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 101

recount, narrative), factual (e.g., procedural, report), and analytical (e.g., account,
explanation, exposition)—marshal different constellations of lexical and grammati-
cal resources and that the demand for more academic register features increases
as students move from personal to factual and analytical genres. From a historical
perspective, academic language has also undergone a dramatic shift over the past
300  years from the elaborated clausal style (i.e., sentence consisting of multiple
clauses) to the compressed phrasal style (i.e., sentence consisting of long nominal
phrases linked by a verb) (Biber & Gray, 2016). The variation in the way language is
used across academic settings, disciplines, tasks, and contexts has led Fang (2016)
to conceive of academic language as the braiding of three language strands—every-
day language, which construes commonsense knowledge; written language, which
construes educational forms of knowledge; and metaphoric language, which con-
strues disciplinary knowledge—with certain strand(s) more heavily present in some
texts than in others. In this sense, then, academic language is perhaps better referred
to as “academic languages” or “academic registers”, for there are as many forms and
functions of academic language as there are academic texts, oral or written.

Academic language, literacy development, and disciplinary learning

Academic language is the language in which school subjects are codified, transmit-
ted, evaluated, and renovated. It is the language used to accomplish increasingly
challenging discursive tasks in school teaching, learning, and assessment. As such,
academic language is widely recognized as crucial to literacy development, disci-
plinary learning, and ultimately academic success in the traditional institutions of
schooling. Heller and Morek (2015) suggested that academic language plays three
roles in schooling: communicative, epistemic, and socio-symbolic. First, academic
language is a medium of knowledge transmission. It is an indispensible resource for
construing, presenting, and communicating educational and disciplinary knowledge
in academic contexts. As students advance through grade levels, they are expected to
engage with progressively more complex and specialized knowledge. This engage-
ment calls for new ways of using language. Specifically, students must develop, in
the words of Christie (2002), “the capacity to deploy language in ways that abstract
away from immediate, lived experience, to build instead truths, abstractions, gen-
eralizations, and arguments about areas of life of various kinds” (p. 66). Second,
academic language is a tool for thinking and intellectual development. It promotes
systematic thinking and scientific reasoning. It enables execution of higher order
cognitive operations such as abstraction, generalization, interpretation, and argu-
ment, allowing students to reconstrue their experience with the social, natural, and
imagined worlds. Third, academic language is a ticket and a visiting card. As a
school-privileged form of discourse, academic language represents cultural capital,
acting as a gate-keeper to educational and disciplinary knowledge and ideology. For
this reason, academic language has been critiqued as a “discourse of appropriate-
ness” that privileges, reinforces, legitimates, and naturalizes dominant White per-
spectives on the standard linguistic and cultural practices of racialized/minoritized
communities (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Control over academic language gives students

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 102 Z. Fang, J. Park

power and agency in literacy development, knowledge building, identity construc-

tion, social positioning, and career advancement. Without access to academic lan-
guage, students are at a distinct disadvantage in school learning, social positioning,
and career development, further exacerbating existing educational inequality and
social injustice. The literacy and learning problems experienced by many students
in school have been attributed in large part to their struggle with academic language
(Schleppegrell, 2004; Snow & Uccelli, 2009). A lack of familiarity with and profi-
ciency in academic language limits access to content, impedes thinking and reason-
ing, handicaps learning and communication, undermines a sense of self-efficacy and
personal empowerment, reduces opportunities for effective classroom participation,
and increases the risk for academic failure and school drop out. As Francis, Rivera,
Lesaux, Kieffer, and Rivera (2006) observed, “Mastery of academic language is
arguably the single most important determinant of academic success for individual
students” (p. 7).
Given the importance of academic language to disciplinary learning and school
success, it is not surprising that it has received considerable attention among edu-
cational researchers. Much of this research, however, focuses on academic vocabu-
lary, especially as it relates to the literacy and content learning outcomes of students
for whom English is not the primary language (see DiCerbo, Anstrom, Baker, &
Rivera, 2014; Nagy & Townsend, 2012 for partial reviews of this body of work).
More recent studies have shown that richly explicit instruction in academic vocabu-
lary produces gains in both word knowledge and text comprehension. For example,
Lesaux, Kieffer, Kelley, and Harris (2014) conducted a randomized field trial to test
an academic vocabulary intervention designed to improve the language and literacy
skills of linguistically diverse sixth-grade students in 14 urban middle schools. The
researchers reported that the 20-week classroom-based intervention improved stu-
dents’ vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness skills, comprehension of
expository texts, and performance on a standardized measure of written language
skills. They further noted that the effects were generally larger for students whose
primary home language is not English and for those students who began the inter-
vention with underdeveloped vocabulary knowledge. Similarly results were obtained
by Vadsy, Sanders and Herrera (2015), who conducted a multi-cohort cluster rand-
omized trial to examine the effects of classroom instruction of 140 Tier Two vocab-
ulary words on reading comprehension of 1232 fourth and fifth grade students in 24
schools.
Moving beyond vocabulary, Uccelli, Galloway, Barr, Meneses, and Dobbs (2015)
explored the relationship between cross-disciplinary academic language proficiency
and reading comprehension among a linguistically and socioeconmically diverse
cross-sectional sample of 218 students in grades 4–6. Students’ cross-disciplinary
academic language proficiency was assessed using an empirically validated instru-
ment that measures 8 core academic language skills—connecting ideas, tracking
themes, organizing texts, breaking words, comprehending sentences, identifying
definitions, interpreting epistemic stance markers, and understanding metalinguistic
vocabulary. The researchers found that academic language proficiency is a significant
predictor of students’ reading comprehension, above and beyond the contributions
of academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 103

characteristics. They also reported that in general, students in lower grade levels,
from lower SES environments, or with an English Learner (EL) designation scored
significantly lower than students in higher grade levels, from higher SES environ-
ments, or without an EL designation, respectively. Similar findings were replicated
with monolingual Spanish-speaking students (e.g., Meneses et al., 2017).
Focusing on writing, Galloway and Ucceli (2015) examined the relationship
between lexicogrammatical skills for concisely and precisely defining a familiar
concept and discourse-organizational skills for structuring a cohesive paragraph,
two facets of productive academic language skills that were hypothesized to sup-
port expository writing in grades 4 through 8. The researchers reported that older
writers with more years of schooling produced written responses that displayed
a higher degree of lexical precision and morpho-syntactic complexity, as well
as greater skill in the production of academic micro-genres (concept definition,
paragraph structuring), than did younger writers. Moreover, the magnitude of
difference in lexicogrammatical skill between students in grades 4–5 and those
in grades 6–8 was greater than that in micro-genre discourse organization skill
between the two groups.
Employing a more extended writing task that was completed within 25  min,
Uccelli, Dobbs, and Scott (2012) examined lexical and grammatical features of 51
persuasive essays written by high school students in response to a prompt similar
to those found in college admission tests. They found that the frequency of organi-
zational markers and epistemic hedges significantly predicted the writing quality of
the persuasive essays, above and beyond the contribution of length, lexical density,
lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity. Similarly, Figueroa, Meneses, and Chan-
dia (2018) explored the relationship between academic language skills and the qual-
ity of written arguments and explanations composed by 8th grade students in Chile.
The writing samples, completed in two 30-min sessions, were elicited using a fic-
tional situation that described the use of tablets in the classroom. They reported that
the students’ academic language proficiency, as measured by a Spanish version of
Uccelli et al.’s (2015) Core Academic Language Skills Instrument, was a significant
predictor of the quality of their writing in both genres, explaining 27% of the vari-
ance in arguments and 34% of the variance in explanations.
To summarize, this brief review of K-12 research literature suggests that aca-
demic language is a significant factor that positively impacts students’ reading/writ-
ing performance and their academic achievement. However, the bulk of the research
focuses on academic vocabulary and its impact on reading comprehension, with par-
ticular attention to English Language Learners (ELL). Much less attention has been
paid to other features of academic language and to the role of academic language in
non-ELL, adolescent students’ writing development. As Snow and Uccelli (2009, p.
113) pointed out,
Ironically, although academic language skills are widely cited as the obsta-
cle to achievement for struggling readers in general, much of the empirical
research on academic language has been done by those studying English
Language Learners (ELLs). In other words, learning ‘academic English’ is
recognized as a challenging task for second-language speakers of English,

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 104 Z. Fang, J. Park

but the challenges faced by native speakers in learning the rules, the struc-
tures, and the content of academic English have received much less atten-
tion.
The present study builds on and extends prior research to address these gaps by
examining seventh-grade (early adolescence) and ninth-grade (mid-adolescence)
students’ use of academic language in science report, a type of informational writing
that is highly prized in the schooling contexts and whose primary purpose is to clas-
sify, describe, and attribute. It is guided by four research questions: (1) What fea-
tures of academic language are present in the adolescents’ informational writing? (2)
Are there differences between grade levels in the way these features are used? (3) Is
proficiency in academic language use associated with students’ reading ability? and
(4) Does academic language use predict the quality of students’ writing? Answers to
these questions will help us uncover the linguistic resources adolescents deploy in
constructing an important genre of schooling, gauge adolescents’ academic language
proficiency, better understand how academic language develops among adolescents,
gain insight into the relationship of academic language proficiency to reading ability
and writing quality, and derive important implications for literacy instruction across
the disciplines.

Methods

Participants

The study was conducted in a K-12 public school in a southeastern state of the
United States. Participants for the study were 93 students from two intact classes

Table 1  Demographic 7rd grade 9th grade Sample

Information about the Sample (n = 48) (n = 45) (n = 93)

Gender
 Male 27 23 50
 Female 21 22 43
School lunch classification
 Free/reduced lunch 6 6 12
 Full pay lunch 42 39 81
Race
 Caucasian 34 30 64
 Black 7 7 14
 Hispanic 4 3 7
 Othera 3 5 8
a
 Includes Asian American, Native American Indian, and Multiracial
American

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 105

each in seventh and ninth grades. The sociodemographic information about the par-
ticipants (ages 12–15) is presented in Table 1.

Data collection

During one of their language arts class periods, participants were asked to write an
informational text in response to the following directions read aloud by their teacher:
Boys and girls, today we are going to write a science report about one of our
state’s most unique animals, alligators. Before you get started, I would like you
to pretend that you were a scientist and nonfiction book author. Now, imag-
ine that you have been studying alligators at Lake Alice [a local swamp] for
months and months. During that time you have taken photos of alligators and
written notes about them. Pretend you have taken those pictures and arranged
them onto the pages of this “book”. Take a few minutes to look through the
pictures in this book. Now, your job is to report what you learned about alliga-
tors during these months of observation in the swamp. Based on the photos
you’ve taken, write as much as you can about alligators from a scientist’s view,
so that other students in your grade who have not seen and don’t know any-
thing about alligators can get to know them. You have as much time as you
need. You do not need to worry about spelling.
The “book” referenced in the prompt is a “wordless” picture book on crocodylia
by Blake (1996), where all the words—including title, author, table of contents,
captions, and index—had been removed for the purpose of this task. The original
version of the book contains both text and photos, presenting rich factual informa-
tion about crocodylia with respect to their origin, physical characteristics, living
habitat, hunting habits, reproduction, and protection. The 24-page book was chosen
for two main reasons. First, it presents a topic that was of sufficient familiarity and
interest to the students. As residents in a city (and state) where alligators (and, to a
lesser extent, crocodiles) are in abundance, participants had seen, read about, and
discussed the reptile in both their in-school and out-of-school experiences. In other
words, they knew quite a bit about the animal through both formal schooling and
informal life experiences. Second, the book has many format-based features typical
of an informational text: It has a table of content and an index; every page contains
at least one colorful photo depicting an aspect of crocodylia; these photos do not
have human characters in them and are neither temporally sequenced nor goal ori-
ented. Thus, as a stimulus for the writing task, the book was likely to elicit an infor-
mational text (factual writing) rather than a story (personal writing).
The writing task resembled other writing assignments students had been doing in
school, where teachers regularly gave prompts—some akin to real-life situations and
others more contrived—in order to prepare students for high stakes writing assess-
ments in the state. The task was administered within 2 weeks toward the end of the
Fall semester. Students were provided sufficient pages of blank lined paper for writ-
ing. The task direction was read in a way similar to what would normally be done in

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 106 Z. Fang, J. Park

a regular class prompt writing session. Besides reading the instruction, the teacher
gave no further hints about the task. All students completed their writing within 45
to 60 min.

Data analysis

Data analysis proceeded in three phases. In phase one, each student’s informational
writing was coded for evidence of academic language features (ALFs). For the pur-
pose of this study, academic language was conceptualized broadly as the language
used in the schooling contexts, where students are usually expected to “display
knowledge authoritatively in highly structured texts” in writing tasks (Schleppegrell,
2004, p. 74). Drawing on the work of Biber and Gray (2016), Schleppegrell (2001,
2004), Christie and Derewianka (2008), and others (e.g., Fang, 2006, 2012; Perera,
1984; Ravid & Berman, 2010), we identified, in Table  2, eleven (11) lexicogram-
matical features as characteristic of academic language.
Two researchers who were knowledgeable about academic language and trained
in systemic functional linguistics each analyzed the texts independently and then
cross-checked with each other. The agreement rate was close to 90%, with dispari-
ties resulting mainly from either coder overlooking certain features. Disagreements
were resolved through discussion in light of each textual context and relevant prior
research studies. Specifically, the following steps were observed in analyzing each
text: (1) divide text into non-embedded clauses, (2) identify academic language fea-
tures in each clause, (3) count the number of occurrences for each academic lan-
guage feature in the text, and (4) calculate the total ALF score by adding up the
number of occurrences for all 11 academic language features.
In phase two, each student’s text was rated holistically for its writing quality. A
six-traits rubric, widely adopted in both classroom and high stakes writing assess-
ments, was used in the rating. Specifically, each text was rated on a scale of 1–6 in
each of the following 6 dimensions of writing—ideas/content, organization, conven-
tions, voice, sentence fluency, word choice. This means that each text could receive
a maximum score of 36 and a minimum score of 6. The rating was done by two
former classroom teachers—one elementary school literacy teacher and the other
secondary school science teacher—who were neither involved in nor familiar with
the above linguistic analysis. Inter-rater reliability, measured by intraclass correla-
tion coefficient, is 0.69, which is moderate and considered good enough (Cicchetti,
1994). The two raters’ scores were averaged to yield a holistic score indicative of the
overall quality of writing.
In phase three, statistical analyses were conducted on the numerical data gener-
ated from phases one and two in order to answer the four research questions for the
study. Because descriptive statistics revealed that the ALF data (frequency counts)
were positively skewed, they were square root transformed for all parametric sta-
tistical tests (ANOVA, Pearson Product-Moment, Regression). Non-parametric
tests (Kruskal–Wallis, Welch, Mann–Whitney) were also performed with the raw
(untransformed) data to ensure robust evidence for interpretation. For all signifi-
cance tests, the alpha level was set at 0.05.

13
 Table 2  Academic language features (ALF)
ALF
ALF1: specialized terminology
ALF2: general academic vocabulary
ALF3: nominalization
ALF4: expanded noun phrase
ALF5: non-restrictive relative clause
ALF6: logical metaphor
ALF7: nonfinite clause
ALF8: appositive
ALF9: impersonal use of passive voice Passive voice used without explicit mention of agency
ALF10: juicy sentence
ALF11: epistemic hedge
13
Explanation
Words or phrases that encapsulate key disciplinary concepts
or ideas
Non-everyday words that appear across academic disciplines
Abstract noun derived from adjective, verb, adverb, or clause
Noun phrase with 3 or more premodifiers, postmodifiers such
as embedded clauses and prepositional phrases, or both pre-
and postmodifiers
Clause introduced by relative pronoun (e.g., which, who,
where) after a comma
Use of nouns, verbs, or prepositions, instead of conjunctions,
to realize logical-semantic links
Clause introduced by a verb that does not show tense
A noun or noun phrase that renames another noun right next
to it
Sentence with unusual, literate-sounding syntactic structure,
such as thematic prominence or interruption construction
Word or phrase that indicates the degree of commitment,
certainty, or deference to authority
Example
reptile, crocodilian
vary, evidence
agility, disappearance, carelessness
these two beautiful creatures; creatures that are big and scary;
creatures with big eyes; these ancient creatures with big eyes
Most of the time alligators and crocodiles are nocturnal, which
means they sleep during the day and hunt at night.
The reason for the removal of alligators is that they are a threat
to tourists’ safety.
Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing
The creature strolled down the stream, looking for preys.
Born in prehistoric time, the creature was gigantic.
The swamp, home of alligators, is only a mile away from my
house.
They were thought to be prehistoric creatures.
This, some paleontologists believe, gives them about
200,000,000 years of hunting genetics to rely on.
Their hides tend to be darker black than that of crocodiles.
107
 108 Z. Fang, J. Park

Results

To examine what features of academic language were used by the students, we gen-
erated descriptive statistics (i.e., means and standard deviations) for the 11 academic
language features identified earlier, both individually and as a whole, by grade level
(see Table  3). It is clear from the table that all 11 features of academic language
were present in the students’ writing, with some features used much more frequently
than were other features. Specifically, general academic vocabulary (e.g., charac-
teristics, intriguing), expanded noun phrases (e.g., these fierce animals with cat-like
reflexes; very powerful jaws that can bite a human’s arm off), specialized terminol-
ogy (e.g., hides, reflexes), and epistemic hedges (e.g., Alligators usually live in fresh-
water; Alligators tend to be thicker and round.) were used with more frequency than
were features such as nominalization (e.g., difference, protection) and passive voice
(e.g., …alligators are raised to be killed for food and their skin). Other features
were used sparingly, including non-finite clauses (e.g., Using its massive jaw and
over 200 teeth, it can bite down with 2000 lbs of pressure.), juicy sentences (e.g., In
every body of water lies an alligator or crocodile.), non-restrictive relative clause
(e.g., Their skin has been made out of purses and shoes, which could make this ani-
mal in danger.), logical metaphors (e.g., Alligators and crocodiles might look cool
with their sharp teeth and tough hides. When alligators go after their prey they move
extremely fast for their size.), and appositives (e.g., Alligators and crocodiles, the
modern day dinosaurs, they’ve been around for millions of year.).
Moreover, the patterns of academic language use appear to be fairly consistent
across the two grade levels. There are striking similarities in both the types and fre-
quencies of academic language features used by seventh and ninth graders. In fact,
one-way ANOVA did not clearly indicate a significant difference between seventh
and ninth grades in the overall ALFs (F [1, 91] = 3.33, p = 0.07). The observed
power for the test is 0.44, which is rather weak. Kruskal–Wallis Test (χ2 = 2.84,
p = 0.09) and the Welch procedure ­(Fasymp = 2.45, p = 0.12) likewise indicated no sig-
nificant grade-level effect on the use of ALFs. Further analysis of individual ALFs
using Mann–Whitney Tests showed that ninth graders made significantly more use
of non-finite clauses (U = 853.5, p = 0.04) and passive voice (U = 808.5, p = 0.03)
than did their seventh grade peers. On the other hand, seventh graders made signifi-
cantly more use of epistemic hedges (U = 791.5, p = 0.02) than did ninth graders.
To determine if academic language use is associated with students’ reading abil-
ity, we first divided students into three groups based on their reading achievement
levels as determined by a high stakes reading test mandated by the state. The state
assigned each student a level (1 to 5) based on their performance on the test. Stu-
dents assigned levels 1 and 2 (i.e., low performing) did not meet the state expecta-
tion for reading achievement and required remediation in school. Students assigned
level 3 (i.e., average performing) met the state expectation for reading achievement.
Students assigned levels 4 and 5 (i.e., high performing) exceeded the state expecta-
tion for reading achievement. The students’ scores on the mandatory state reading
test and their overall academic language features by reading level are presented in
Table 4.

13
 Table 3  Means and standard deviations (in parenthesis) of academic language features (ALF) by grade level
ALF1 ALF2 ALF3 ALF4 ALF5 ALF6 ALF7 ALF8 ALF9 ALF10 ALF11 Total

7th 1.98 (1.95) 2.50 (2.44) 0.94 (1.16) 2.23 (1.83) 0.13 (0.44) 0.08 (0.28) 0.42 (0.87) 0.06 (0.32) 0.79 (1.03) 0.19 (0.45) 2.50 (1.95) 11.8 (7.20)
9th 2.53 (1.88) 3.47 (3.01) 1.27 (1.18) 2.29 (1.99) 0.13 (0.41) 0.16 (0.37) 0.71 (0.94) 0.04 (0.21) 1.33 (1.31) 0.49 (0.94) 1.58 (1.71) 14.00 (6.27)
Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing

Sample 2.25 (1.93) 2.97 (2.76) 1.10 (1.17) 2.26 (1.90) 0.13 (0.42) 0.12 (0.33) 0.56 (0.91) 0.05 (0.27) 1.05 (1.20) 0.33 (0.74) 2.05 (1.89) 12.87 (6.82)
109

13
 110 Z. Fang, J. Park

Table 4  Means and Standard Reading level Total ALFs Holistic scores Reading scores
Deviations (in parenthesis) of
Academic Language Features, Seventh grade
Holistic Scores, and Reading
Scores by Grade Level and  Low (n = 10) 8.70 (4.97) 19.95 (2.77) 276.10 (23.32)
Reading Level  Average (n = 18) 8.00 (4.80) 22.19 (5.04) 315.44 (11.02)
 High (n = 20) 16.80 (7.13) 28.08 (5.14) 374.25 (33.36)
 Total (n = 48) 11.81 (7.20) 24.18 (5.76) 331.75 (46.12)
Ninth grade
 Low (n = 11) 10.82 (6.65) 22.64 (4.46) 287.18 (15.37)
 Average (n = 11) 13.73 (4.78) 25.86 (5.01) 326.73 (9.24)
 High (n = 23) 15.65 (6.34) 26.96 (4.95) 385.00 (19.84)
 Total (n = 45) 14.00 (6.27) 25.63 (5.06) 346.84 (44.97)
Sample
 Low (n = 21) 9.81 (5.86) 21.36 (3.91) 281.90 (19.88)
 Average (n = 29) 10.17 (5.49) 23.59 (5.26) 319.72 (11.63)
 High (n = 43) 16.19 (6.66) 27.48 (5.01) 380.00 (27.19)
 Total (n = 93) 12.87 (6.82) 24.88 (5.45) 339.05 (45.95)

The relationship between reading test scores and academic language use is
graphically represented in Fig.  1. Pearson Product-Moment Correlation analysis
revealed significant—and moderately strong—positive association between read-
ing ability and academic language use for seventh grade (r = 0.50, p < 0.001),
ninth grade (r = 0.39, p < 0.001), and the entire sample (r = 0.46, p < 0.001). Fur-
ther analysis using one-way ANOVA indicated significant differences in academic
language use among all students with different reading achievement levels (F [2,

7th Grade
9th Grade
30
25
20
Total ALF
15
10
5
0

250 300 350 400 450

Reading Score

Fig. 1  Relationship between reading scores and academic language use

13
Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 111

90] = 11.14, p < 0.001), regardless of grade level. About 20% of the ALF use is
due to differences in students’ reading ability, and the observed power (0.99)
is strong. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons (Tukey) revealed that students whose
reading achievement exceeded the state expectation (levels 4 & 5) significantly
outscored those who fell short of the state expectation (p < 0.001) or met the state
expectation (p < 0.001). Alternative tests using Kruskal–Wallis Test (χ2 = 18.89,
p < 0.001) and the Welch procedure ­(Fasymp = 11.23, p < 0.001) also indicated a
significant effect of reading ability on the students’ use of ALFs.
ANOVA also showed significant differences among seventh grade students
with different reading achievement levels (F [2, 45] = 10.64, p < 0.001). About
32% of the seventh graders’ ALF use is due to differences in their reading abil-
ity, and the observed power (0.99) is strong. Post-hoc pairwise comparisons
(Tukey) revealed that seventh graders whose reading achievement exceeded the
state expectation made significantly more use of academic language features
than did those meeting the state expectation (p < 0.001) or falling short of the
state expectation (p < 0.001). This finding is further confirmed by the results
from the Kruskal–Wallis Test (χ2 = 15.68, p < 0.001) and the Welch procedure
­(Fasymp = 10.62, p < 0.001).
For ninth grade, ANOVA did not indicate significant differences in ALF use
among students of different reading achievement levels (F [2, 42] = 2.82, p = 0.07).
Additional analysis using the Kruskal–Wallis test (χ2 = 4.44, p = 0.11) and the Welch
procedure ­(Fasymp = 2.00, p = 0.16) confirmed a lack of significant reading ability
effect on the ninth graders’ ALF use.
Finally, we conducted correlation analysis to see if there is any significant rela-
tionship between academic language use and writing quality, as measured by holis-
tic scores (see Table 4). One-way ANOVA showed no significant difference between
seventh grade and ninth grade in the overall quality of writing (F [1, 91] = 3.05,
p = 0.08). The observed power of the test is rather weak at 0.41. Likewise, the
Kruskal–Willis test (χ2 = 2.42, p = 0.12) and the Welch procedure ­(Fasymp = 3.104,
p = 0.08) did not detect any significant difference between the two grade levels.
Pearson Product-Moment correlation analysis showed a significant positive asso-
ciation (with moderate to high strength) between ALF use and writing quality for
seventh grade (r = 0.72, p < 0.01), ninth grade (r = 0.41, p < 0.01), and the entire
sample (r = 0.61, p < 0.01). Simple linear regression analysis showed that ALF use
is a significant predictor of writing quality for seventh grade (F [1, 46] = 44.48,
p < 0.001), ninth grade (F [1,43] = 5.57, p = 0.02), and the entire sample (F [1,
91] = 46.77, p < 0.001), accounting for, respectively, close to half ­(r2 = 0.48), slightly
over one-tenth (­r2 = 12%), and one-third ­(r2 = 0.33) of the total variance in writing
quality. These outcomes were further confirmed by the finding that the slopes for the
tests were significantly different from 0 (p < 0.001) and that the confidence interval
around the unstandardized slope did not include 0.

Discussion

Our study explored adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing.

13
 112 Z. Fang, J. Park

It found that the seventh and ninth graders in the study made limited use of ALFs
in their writing and that there was considerable variation within each grade level but
no significant differences between the two grade levels in ALF use. Additionally,
ALF use is significantly associated with reading ability. That is, students with higher
reading achievement levels tended to use more ALFs than did those with lower read-
ing achievement levels. Moreover, academic language is a reliable predictor of writ-
ing quality. Texts with more ALFs tended to receive higher scores for their holistic
quality than did those with fewer ALFs.
It is not surprising that the students in our study drew on a somewhat narrow set
of ALFs in their informational writing. Instead, they relied quite extensively on the
lexicogrammatical resources of everyday language, which are often not as valued
in academic writing. These resources include colloquial expressions (e.g., I may be
wrong but I’m pretty sure that there are alligators in Australia. This amphibian is
highly dangerous but very cool to study.), interrogative or imperative sentences (e.g.,
How long have alligators been on earth? Don’t mess with them.), first or second
personal pronouns (e.g., If you look at them they can give you quite a scare.), refer-
ence to writer’s mental process (e.g., I think that they have webbed feet to help them
swim better.), discourse fillers (e.g., Alligators are also incredibly old, like, back to
the cretaceous period old.), sentences starting with connective adjuncts (e.g., But
remember these fierce animals with cat-like reflexes have a dangerous personality.
Also, they may not look very fast on land.), pronouns with unclear or inconsistent
references (e.g., They watch over their nest, making sure no one comes to bother her
babies.), amplificatory noun phrase tag (e.g., They are really precious those alliga-
tors.), and recapitulatory pronouns (e.g., Alligators they are very popular in Flor-
ida.). The two sample texts in Table 5 provide a snapshot of the kinds of language
resources the students in the sample deployed in their writing.
Similar findings have been reported in other studies of adolescents’ informational
writing. For example, Schleppegrell (1998) found that in writing a description of a
picture of an animal or a plant in a science magazine, seventh and eighth graders
made many lexical and grammatical choices that are characteristic of everyday lan-
guage but often problematic for meeting school expectations. It is likely that the stu-
dents in our study were limited in their academic language repertoire such that they
had to rely more heavily on their everyday language, a resource that is more plenti-
ful and familiar to them, for making meaning. It is also likely that our study’s task
contributed to the students’ heavy use of everyday language. Although the students
were explicitly asked to write as a “nonfiction book author” and “from a scientist’s
view”, the task prompt used words like “imagine” and “pretend” that might have
led them to write in a more storytelling-like manner, for which everyday language
would be appropriate. Additionally, the students might have been influenced by the
language patterns in an increasingly popular type of informational books, called
narrative informational texts (e.g., The Magic School Bus books written by Joanna
Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen), that presents factual information in a narra-
tive style. The intended audience for the writing, grade-level peers, may have also
encouraged the students to draw on the more interpersonal and interactive lexico-
grammatical resources available in everyday language.

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 113

Table 5  Sample informational texts written by adolescents

Seventh grade sample

Alligators have igzisted for a long time. They eat a lot! Stuff like fish, birds, ducks any sorta meat. They
live in mud swamps, lakes, normal swamps. Alligators come out of eggs. Soon they hatch and then stay
with there mother until ready to be alone. They are more scared of humans than we are scared of them.
Crocodiles have skinny mouths and Alligators sort of have extra skin under their mouths. Alligators
live on land and water. Some times in back yards. Baby Alligators can swim when they are really little.
Its like an insticked. If an Alligators is chasing after you, it is better to swirve because since they have
such short legs it is harder to turn fast. So it makes them go slower. They can live on oceans too. But
they don’t go to deep. They pretty much stay a long shore
Ninth-grade sample
Which one is stronger, the alligator or the crocodile? Which one would win in a battle? I say the croco-
dile wins the battle and the crocodile is the strongest
The crocodile is the strongest reptile because it has so much aggression. Never pick a fight with a croco-
dile. Crocodiles have the strongest grip with their teeth. Plus one swing of their tail you knee caps will
just buckle in
Crocodiles are not wild in florida so, we Floridians have nothing to worry about. But you Australians bet-
ter watch out. Crocodiles are native to Australia and they do kill alot of people. I maybe wrong but I’m
pretty sure that there are Alligators in Australia
Crocodiles eat nothing but meat. Even when they may not be hungry they will still eat any meat they can
get too. People will kill crocodiles for their skin. Crocodiles are really famous for their skin
Well save the crocodiles and kill a croc. hunter

Note: No correction of any sort (e.g., spelling, punctuation) was made to either text in order to preserve
the author’s original style and voice

Of the 11 ALFs present in the students’ writing, general academic vocabulary,

specialized terminology, expanded noun phrase, and epistemic hedge were used
most frequently. Nominalization and passive voice were also used, but to a much
less extent. Nonfinite clause, non-restrictive relative clause, appositive, logical meta-
phor, and juicy sentence were used only sparingly. Given the students’ familiarity
with the topic and their cumulative years of schooling, it makes sense that special-
ized terminology, general academic vocabulary, and expanded noun phrase were the
most frequently employed features. Developmental factors may be at work here as
well. Research on children’s language development has shown an increasing degree
of structural complexity over the school years. This is evidenced in the greater use of
longer and more complex noun phrases, passive voice, and modals as children move
from elementary to middle and high school (see, for example, Logan, 1976; Perera,
1984; Myhill, 2009; Berman & Ravid, 2009). According to Christie and Derewianka
(2008), a landmark volume on writing development from early childhood to late
adolescence, expanded noun phrase, non-finite clause, and passive voice emerge
during late childhood and early adolescence (ages 9–12) and become more com-
mon in mid- (ages 13–15 years) to late (ages 16–18 years) adolescence. They noted
that nominalization and logical metaphor are not typical until late adolescence. They
also suggested that attitudinal resources such as modal adverbs (e.g., likely, surely,
undoubtedly) and modal verbs (e.g., could, may, would) are not common (especially
in science) until mid-adolescence. The students in our study (ages 12–15) were able
to use hedges such as tend to, probably, and likely to moderate their knowledge

13
 114 Z. Fang, J. Park

claims; however, they also used a strikingly heavy dose of boosters such as really,
so, very, and extremely to strengthen their statements, claims and evaluations, which
is more common in everyday language but uncharacteristic of informational writing
in academic and disciplinary contexts.
Despite the general trend toward greater structural complexity reported in the lan-
guage development literature, no significant difference was detected in the overall
ALF use between seventh and ninth grades. Two features that ninth graders used
significantly more than did seventh graders are non-finite clause and passive voice,
though both features were used with rather low frequency. On the other hand, sev-
enth graders used significantly more epistemic hedges than did ninth graders. These
findings suggest that the development of academic language, like the development
of language and literacy in general (e.g., Christie & Derewianka 2012; Ferguson
& Slobin, 1973; Perera, 1984), may be nonlinear and feature-specific, with some
features registering more robust growth than do others during a particular period
of growth and maturation. The development may also be dependent on context and
experience. That is, when students have ample opportunities to engage with aca-
demic language through exposure and/or instruction, they are more likely to notice,
internalize, and appropriate its features. In this connection, it is important to point
out that current literacy instruction in language arts and other content areas typi-
cally does not pay due respect to academic language outside of academic vocabulary
and beyond the ELL contexts (Applebee & Langer, 2006). It is also worth pointing
out that as students advance in schooling, they generally become less engaged with
academic reading (Ivey & Broaddus, 2001), meaning that they have less exposure
to informational texts and academic language. There is no reason to suspect, based
on our work in the participating school, that the literacy experience of the partici-
pants in our study was markedly different from that reported in the general research
literature. This potential lack of engagement with academic texts may explain the
limited use of ALFs, a lack of significant growth across grades, and non-signifi-
cant differences in holistic quality of writing between the two grade levels. On the
other hand, given the complexity of academic language and the non-linear nature
of language development in general, it may not be unreasonable to expect less than
robust growth or even a temporary dip in academic language over a period of merely
2 years. Similarly, the considerable within-grade variation in academic language use
is also likely due to developmental and experiential factors.
Another notable finding of the study is that reading ability is significantly related
to academic language use. That is, students with higher reading achievement levels
used more ALFs than did those with lower reading achievement levels. This find-
ing is consistent with prior research (e.g., Uccelli et  al., 2015), which found that
academic language proficiency is a significant predictor of reading comprehension.
Together, these studies suggest a robust reciprocal relationship between academic
language proficiency and reading ability. That is, students with higher reading abil-
ity know more about academic language and students who use more (and by impli-
cation know more about) academic language read better. It is plausible that students
who have higher reading proficiency read more for academic purposes, thus hav-
ing more exposure to academic language; and familiarity with academic language
in turn allows students to divest cognitive resources from linguistic processing to

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 115

building a situation model (i.e., comprehension) during reading. It is somewhat puz-

zling, however, that the strength of the relationship appears to be stronger in seventh
grade than in ninth grade. One possible explanation for this is that as students grow
older, they tend to interact more with social media and spend less time on read-
ing extended school-based texts for academic purposes, which in effect reduces their
encounter with academic language. These interpretations are, of course, conjectures
that require empirical validation.
The significant relationship between academic language use and holistic qual-
ity of student writing found in our study is not unexpected. Previous research (e.g.,
Figueroa et  al., 2018; Galloway & Ucceli, 2015; Uccelli et  al., 2012) has also
reported significant positive relationship between certain academic language skills
(e.g., use of linguistic markers for abstraction, precision, organization, and stance)
and the overall quality of academic writing (e.g., definition, persuasive essay). Like
previous studies, our study found that academic language use is a significant predic-
tor of writing quality, accounting for a substantial amount of the total variance in
holistic quality. It is conceivable that students with higher academic language pro-
ficiency have more exposure to models of academic writing through their interac-
tion with academic texts. This proficiency in turn, as Galloway and Ucceli (2015)
surmised, enables students to channel their cognitive resources to generating ideas,
sharpening focus, and facilitating discursive flow during composition.
Given the robust relationship of academic language use to reading proficiency
and writing quality, it is important that students develop a range of lexicogram-
matical resources that are functional for constructing academic genres with dif-
ferent degrees of abstraction, density, objectivity, impersonality, and authori-
tativeness. Teachers can play an active role in supporting this development.
However, current efforts to improve students’ reading comprehension and writ-
ing proficiency have tended to background the role of academic language (other
than academic vocabulary) in reading and writing development, with the conse-
quence that students often lack the linguistic tools for performing academic tasks
in ways that meet the school expectations (Schleppegrell, 2004). One power-
ful way to help students expand their academic language repertoire is to engage
them in reading and analyzing academic texts of different types, explaining to
them why the author made the particular lexicogrammatical choices and how a
different set of linguistic options may have altered meaning, changed style, or
impacted discursive flow in ways that would enhance or impede communica-
tion (Fang, 2016; Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008). In this work, caution needs be
exercised against providing lists of academic language features for students to
memorize or use unreflectively. Instead, attention to authenticity, function, con-
text and meaning is of paramount importance. As Langer (2011) emphasized,
academic language needs to be taught “through first-hand disciplinary experi-
ences, as language and thought-in-use, in content–area classes” (p. 4), where
students have ample opportunities to read, write and talk about topics of signifi-
cance as they engage in meaningful disciplinary inquiries. At the same time, it is
worth bearing in mind that there is no intrinsic merit to academic language fea-
tures; they are, to borrow from British writing researcher Debra Myhill (2009),
“simply linguistic possibilities available to the writer as tools for shaping text”

13
 116 Z. Fang, J. Park

(p. 405). In other words, academic language is a network of choices that enables
its users to mean in ways expected of them in school. It does not in itself make a
text more grammatical or more communicative, but simply more the kind of text
teachers expect, schools value, and experts favor.
Our study suffers from several limitations that must be mentioned. Because
the participants in the study were predominantly White and from middle class
backgrounds, we were not able to meaningfully explore the impact of sociode-
mographic factors on academic language use. Future studies can use a larger
sample size with participants from socioculturally and linguistically diverse
backgrounds to investigate whether and how academic language use var-
ies among students from different socioeconomic, racial, or minoritized back-
grounds; how academic language develops across different phases (or grade lev-
els) of schooling; and how academic language proficiency relates to disciplinary
reading and writing abilities. In addition, our study used a “wordless” picture as
a stimulus to elicit writing. While the task is not uncommon in experimental or
quasi-experimental research and has the advantage of maximizing comparabil-
ity across grade levels, it is nonetheless somewhat artificial and may not call
for deployment of the full range of academic language features identified in this
study. There is thus a chance that the task does not afford all students the oppor-
tunity to fully demonstrate their academic language repertoire. Future research
can examine a wider range of academic language features (beyond those used
in the study) in multiple writing samples across multiple academic genres col-
lected from authentic units of classroom instruction. These studies will provide
a clearer picture of diverse students’ academic language repertoire and its devel-
opmental trajectories.
Finally, given the importance of academic language to literacy development
and disciplinary learning, it is also imperative to examine effective ways of pro-
moting academic language development in disciplinary contexts, addressing
such questions as (a) what is the role of metalanguage in supporting students’
academic language development? (b) how can diverse students’ existing lin-
guistic capital be leveraged to support the development of academic language
repertoire and academic identity in service of disciplinary learning and com-
munication? (c) how can a focus on linguistic markers of disciplinary literacy
help students foster a sense of belonging within a discipline and boost their
confidence in disciplinary exploration? and (d) how can teacher capacity be
effectively enhanced with respect to their knowledge about language and their
classroom practices involving academic language. Answers to these and other
questions will yield more robust pedagogical approaches and evidence-based
strategies for supporting academic language development and disciplinary learn-
ing at the same time.

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Adolescents’ use of academic language in informational writing 117

Conclusion

Informational writing is a key genre of schooling that is also highly valued in

workplace and society. Developing control over a range of linguistic resources
for creating informational texts should thus be a high priority in literacy instruc-
tion, especially given the convergent findings from our research and other related
but differently designed studies. Myhill (2009) argued that writing is a process of
design that involves “moving along the trajectories from speech patterns to writing
patterns, from declaration to elaboration, and from translation and transformation”
(p. 412). Navigating this process requires that students develop a repertoire of lin-
guistic resources that includes, but is not limited to, the academic language features
described in our study, for the process cannot be set in motion without the very lin-
guistic tools that are functional for construing markers of advanced literacy such as
generalization, abstraction, interpretation, density, elaboration, objectivity, author-
ity, hierarchy, and flow. This development work matters to all students and should be
the responsibility of teachers in all subject areas.

Acknowledgements  The preparation of this paper was supported in part by the National Research Center
for Foreign Language Education (MOE Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Uni-
versities), Beijing Foreign Studies University. We thank Valerie Gresser and Erin Mistry for their assis-
tance with data analysis.

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