The role of language in students’ justifications of scientific phenomena

Making decisions and constructing arguments with scientific evidence and reasoning are essential skills for all members of society, especially in a world facing complex socioscientific issues (climate change, global pandemics, etc.). Argumentation is a complex linguistic practice, but little is known about how students from diverse language backgrounds engage in argumentation. The goal of this study was to identify how students’ English language proficiency/history was associated with the reasoning demonstrated in their written arguments. We found that students with lower English proficiency and less English history produced fewer causal responses compared to students with higher English language proficiency and history. Follow-up interviews with fifteen participants revealed that students’ comfort communicating in English on assessments depended on a combination of general and academic language experiences. Findings suggest a need to identify what barriers students from diverse language backgrounds encounter during argumentation to ensure students from all language backgrounds have equitable opportunities to demonstrate their abilities.

Moving Towards Translanguaging

Emerging bilinguals at US schools are generally subject to programs that are inadequate for their learning needs. It is crucial to find teaching models through which they can develop their academic language skills. This chapter presents the program Learn from the Experts, a partnership between a university and a high school, that fosters collaboration between Spanish and English learners. In this program, which follows the translanguaging pedagogy, Spanish learners from the university meet to collaborate with Spanish heritage English learners from the high school in lessons designed to develop each of the participants' skills in the language they are learning. The chapter also presents pedagogical changes made to the program resulting from the program team's reflection. It contributes to the development of models that support emerging bilinguals' language learning through collaboration with more experienced speakers without compelling speakers of minoritized languages to distance themselves from their languages and cultures.

Pinkas-notebook and pinkas-register book: evolution, structure, and composition

Minute books (pinkas) constitute one of the most valuable sources for studying the history of the Jewish communal institutions up to the 20th century. They comprise rich and diverse data on the everyday activities of the Jewish people. In the academic language, the word “pinkas” is applied not only to the communal minute books and minute books of the communal bodies but also to private minute books. The article deals with the development of this category of sources which evolved from private minute books dating back to at least the 11th century to the communal ones as well as the minute books of the communal bodies based on the dozen manuscript examples. These are mostly of European origin, however, with a few Eastern additions. This evolution process becomes visible as a result of the analysis of the manuscripts’ internal structure and composition. Special attention is paid to the techniques used to enforce this structure on codicological and paleographic levels. The data at hand suggest that at the beginning of the Modern period some of the minute books were shifted from private to the public domain. This was a response to the demand from the rapidly evolving communal institutions. To suit the widened audience of varying backgrounds the communal minute books compared to those for private use adopted a more uniform structure as well as with a set of “navigation” or referencing tools, such as captions written on margins. The early modern Italian communal minute books tend to be the most structured ones.

Vorlesung und Hörsaal als Symptomwörter für Geschichte und Gegenwart der deutschen Sprache

The article starts with the etymology of the words Vorlesung („lecture“) and Hörsaal (“lecture hall”). On the one hand, it turns out that the two expressions are deeply anchored in the history of the old Latin scientific language. They transmit Latin structures and perspectives in German neologisms. On the other hand, the two words arose exactly at the time when the sciences were moving from Latin to German, thus distancing themselves from the traditional forms of Latin scholarship. In this light, they exemplify an epochal change in the history of the German language, but at the same time they represent a great European continuity. Against this background, the two words can be interpreted as symptomatic words associated with the Enlightenment’s confident outlook on the future relationship between science and society. Further corpus linguistic surveys also show how productively the two words appear in word formation processes. In particular, these surveys show by way of example that and how German standard language has benefited from the emergence of German academic language.

Teaching Academic Vocabulary to English Language Learners (ELLs)

Confronted with dual learning tasks—learning English as a 2nd language and grade-level content, English Language Learners (ELLs) in K-12 are often found struggling to become fluent in English and falling behind in academic studies. It is commonly recognized that academic vocabulary is strongly related to academic achievement. Academic vocabulary is of critical importance in content learning and key to classroom interactions as students are engaged in learning activities using academic language. This article will zero in on the challenges students encounter in learning academic vocabulary. It will start with the importance of teaching ELLs academic vocabulary, followed by a classification of academic vocabulary, and an elaboration of the characteristics of academic language. Teacher candidates will explore why sheltered instruction is indispensable for the learning of vocabulary and how the two main sources of word learning—incidental learning and explicit instruction, facilitates vocabulary development. The focus will be placed on the specific strategies to help students develop a rich academic vocabulary inventory. It is hoped that teacher candidates will walk away with some guiding principles on teaching academic vocabulary and find these principles helpful in their classrooms with ELLs.

Linguists and language workers

In this paper, I address two connected topics: firstly, the relationships between linguists working in academia and language professionals, such as communication managers and consultants, in other sectors; and secondly, how a strong emphasis on knowledge exchange and impact in British higher education policy has led to increased collaboration between academic and non-academic language workers, but also to a realignment of traditional academic values with the interests of practitioners. The investigation is partly based on published reflections – mostly by linguists – on collaborating with (language) professionals in other sectors, and partly on insights from 13 interviews with language workers in consulting, communications and campaigning. The interviews are manually analysed for thematic categories and, where relevant, for pragmatic meanings in the context of the interview situation and conversational interaction. Findings suggest conflicts around registers and timescales, along with concerns over data and the relevance of academic interests. Crucially, language professionals show little concern about collaborating with academics, leading to an imbalance in interests. I supplement the evidence with personal observations on the opportunities and obstacles that are present when straddling academic and non-academic work, as well as with a discussion of how a unidirectional realignment of values changes the nature of academic work.

Academic language as an object of teaching foreign languages to philology students

In the modern socio-educational environment, which is developed through intercultural exchange and the implementation of new methods of spreading knowledge, communication in the student environment is based on the exchange of visual images and philological units. For students of the philological direction, communication with foreign language communicants is determined by the possibility of improving the function of conversation, perception of cultural characteristics and obtaining new images. Of relevance is the perception of not only spoken language by students, but also of the academically correct lexical group. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that academic language is often perceived as a kind of anachronism, as something insufficient to expand linguistic competence. The study proves that the readiness of students to implement the provisions of academic language is possible not only culturally, but is also achievable by pedagogical methods. The study demonstrates that the implementation of the extended learning format is achieved through the techniques of linguistic learning. The practical significance of the study is that the perception of academic language will allow students of the philological direction to implement their skills in various social spheres, which may require historical language research and be predominantly fundamental.