Reflection on Academic Language
The topic I found interesting is the features of academic grammar. I remember that uneasy feeling I experienced first year in undergrad when I began to read the academic textbooks, articles and papers. It took a number of years for me to become accustomed to reading academic writing. The features of academic writing are long sentences, passive voice, nominalization and condensed complex messages. Students need to be taught to break down clauses and to focus on the main point of the sentence. While I believe it is important for ELL learners who are just starting to learn English to be aware of how clauses function, I would not choose readings that involve strings of clauses just to get them warmed up. I feel that would likely frustrate them, just as I was. We need to gradually increase the doses of clauses and not overburden the ELLs right off the bat. Besides, I personally feel some long sentences are simply unnecessarily complicated. Complex sentences with a lot of subordinating conjunctions can be broken down into smaller parts. The point is whatever subject(s) we teach, our lessons (and choice of text, especially for English class) need to adjust to the student’s level of academic language; the lessons need to be student-centered.
When I reached third year, I met this English professor who discouraged us to use the passive voice because, according to her handout, her “attention span is restricted by this practice” since “it is used to make the paper sound as though it is written with authority”. She points out the actual effect of using the passive voice is putting the reading process in slow motion. I cannot agree more. So there, even professors who use academic language do not necessarily all agree on the taken-for-granted rules!
Nominalization is wonderful. As the text says, the purpose is to pack higher levels of abstraction into one sentence. I feel it is important for ELLs to learn how verbs and nouns convert to adjectives, and also how they are nominalized. They need to be aware of the different forms of a word in order to extract the abstract meanings packed in the sentence.
Finally, I like this quote: “Students can try to be overly academic at the expense of clarity. We all have seen papers and books whose authors have overcomplicated the language of a text or speech to the point of sounding pretentious or stilted. They use sentences that are too long, they use too many clauses and ‘SAT words’, and the message ends up being too concentrated or muddy to make sense to the reader or listener.” (p.39). Our objective in teaching ELLs academic language is not to have them embellish their writing with unnecessary clauses and dangling nominalized terms that obscure the meaning. Our objective is help them to express their ideas, logic and thoughts with clarity and precision, whether on an academic paper or in formal oral speech.