Understanding The Limits of Academic Language
Jeff Zweirs explains the role of academic language in his text on “Building Academic Language.” Academic language has the potential to be an incredible tool to aid us in communication, especially in the classroom. Unfortunately, it often leads to confusion and misunderstanding in both English language learners and native speakers with tragic frequency. Zweirs only covers the issue of clarity very briefly, but I believe clarity to be one of the largest barriers preventing youth from adopting academic language.
Unsurprisingly, academic language is used most heavily amongst academics, presumably more than any other population. Yet even within academia, mainstream English is the more comfortable of the two languages. Academic language is built upon a foundation of mainstream English, and no matter how advanced a given academic may be, it is still a learned register. In other words, academic language is a second language even to the most specialized and verbose of academics.
I would never argue that academic language is superfluous. We can use a single word to explain a concept that would otherwise take a great deal of communication to explain. It allows us to communicate concepts that are often abstract or complex in a more effective, concise, and salient manner. There is a tradeoff though: there exists a threshold where academic language ceases to be beneficial. In fact, it can be entirely counterproductive, decreasing the clarity, limiting the audience, and diluting the material. It is not necessarily an issue of vocabulary; even words that a well-educated person thoroughly understands may become overwhelming when packed into a single run-on sentence.
I wouldn’t necessarily argue that academic language standards need to be lowered across the board. It is simply my belief that academic language shouldn’t be used for its own sake; after all, we wouldn’t say to a child: “Wouldn’t you like to relieve yourself in the lavatory?” We would simply ask “Do you need to potty?” When we use academic language, we must constantly be questioning our motives. Are we using a given term because we have enough experience in our field to know the specialized language required to describe it, or because we can actually use that term to better articulate ourselves to our audience?
I’ve created this fun graph to better visualize this notion. The main disagreement is upon when and where efficiency begins to decline.
An example of where I believe this ‘sweet spot’ can be found is with the celebrated TED series. Scientist, artists, and activists are able to effectively and concisely communicate their area of interest to one another, even when discussing very cutting-edge concepts, through the use of a very minimal amount of academic language. It is at a level that is likely universal amongst those with a basic, unspecialized secondary-level background.
In a post-modern world, what benefit is there to keeping this knowledge exclusive to our specialization, limiting the breadth of who can interpret and find meaning in what we are saying? I believe that the more we can communicate what we mean without losing our audience on the words we choose to express ourselves, the more culturally relevant our discipline can become.