Chapter 3: Making Sense of the Academic Registers of Schooling

In chapter 3, Freeman & Freeman explore in detail academic registers of schooling and reflect on what teachers can do in their classrooms to help ELLs develop these oral and written academic registers. The Freemans use academic language proficiency as defined by Cummmins':

“the extent to which an individual has command of the oral and written academic registers of schooling.”

Essentially, in order to master the academic registers of schooling struggling readers need to develop both a grammatical and communicative proficiency in English.

The Freemans explain that a register is the language used in a specific context as stated by Halliday and Hassan. According to them, there are two kinds of context; the context of culture and the context of situation. The context of culture being the specific way in which a culture does things. However, this knowledge is only acquired when one interacts in that particular culture. ELLs are often unfamiliar with the covert rules in their new environment and are unfamiliar with the context of culture in U.S. schools. The context of situation is the slightly different, here language is used according to each situation as described by these three elements: field, tenor, and mode.

·         Field: topic being talked about or written about.

·         Tenor: the relationship between the speaker and the listener or the reader and the writer.

·         Mode: means of communication.

The Freemans describe how register can be applied in different ways and as a result the kinds of language participants’ use also varies. Next, Freeman & Freeman focus on Gibbons (2002) and his account on how teachers can use classroom discussions as a way to scaffold learning to help students build a bridge from conversational to academic language. I found this particularly helpful and reinforcing of the notion that educators must make an effort to get to know the kids in their classrooms. The Freemans advocate that scaffolded classroom talk enables students to participate successfully in related reading and writing activities.  

Here the Freemans refer to Scarcella (2003) to describe five components of grammatical competence: phonological component, the lexical component, the grammatical component, the sociolinguistic component, and the discourse component. Some of the strategies teachers can use to help students develop the phonological component of academic language are:

• accompanying lectures with written language, either in the form of handouts;
• writing key words on the board;
• using PowerPoint presentations; or
• providing audio tapes of text so that students can listen to their textbooks being read as they follow along in their own books. 

Next, the Freemans call on Gee’s primary Discourse and secondary Discourses sociolinguistic theory. As we know from reading Gee, primary Discourses being norms for acting, thinking, valuing, and using the language of that social group.  Secondary Discourses being expectations students must learn on how to think, act, believe, speak, read, and write in order to be successful. The registers used in content-area classrooms require a different vocabulary and syntax than those used in other contexts. As a consequence, teachers need to help students develop the appropriate academic language for their subject through carefully scaffolded instruction and modeling such behavior. While I agree with this notion, I’m a little concerned as to how reasonable that is in terms of time with the demands already placed on teachers.

Lastly, the Freemans discuss the dominant role teachers play in the classroom, since in most classes the teacher does most of the talking. This is largely due to the high utilization of the IRE sequence (initiation, response, evaluation). Here the Freemans discuss, the effectiveness of this sequence in helping students develop academic language. They suggest that a way to address this would be to use some of the strategies by Mohr and Mohr (2007) such as:

• ask open-ended questions;
• probing; and
• respond in ways that encourage students to elaborate their responses and thinking. 

The Freemans conclude the chapter by discussing how students acquire linguistic competence through membership in social groups.  ELLs need to develop sociolinguistic competence. Both grammatical and communicative language proficiencies are complex and must be acquired in the context of meaningful use which is why these students need extended support or apprenticeships, to gain control of the academic oral and written registers of schooling.

English Language Learners: Culture, Equity and Language video. (NEA Priority Schools Campaign)