Supporting Academic Language Development for Multilingual Learners Across Content Areas Through the Identification of Textual Features

Abstract

At a time when educators are tasked with ensuring that all students develop the academic literacy skills necessary for school success, this article investigates some textual features of academic language in different content areas using systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an approach to support multilingual learners’ development of academic language (AL). The article provides a brief overview of SFL and demonstrates how this theoretical framework supports the development of AL. An analysis of a variety of texts across the content areas of English language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics at the elementary level illustrates different features of AL. Following this analysis, the article discusses these features of AL in contrast with everyday language. This article concludes with some implications for teacher education and research.

Keywords

• academic language
• disciplinary literacies
• multilingual learners
• systemic functional linguistics
• pre-service teacher education