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While research unequivocally points to the need to teach the language that supports participation in reading and writing activities in middle-grade classrooms, many educators grapple with how to create the instructional conditions that promote equitable and just opportunities for students to learn the Language of School Literacy (LSL). In this article, I operationalize the Access-Voice-Choice (AVC) framework and illustrate its application through teaching vignettes. The AVC framework engages educators in considering how to in which language serves as a medium: (1) for giving learners "access" to concepts and content contained in school texts and to the communities where this knowledge is produced; (2) for amplifying student voice; and (3) for providing learners with "choice" in the language they use in the classroom and in the linguistic communities in which they choose to participate. This critical framework offers a useful heuristic model to think about "how" and "why" we teach LSL to our students. I argue that if the goal of our instruction is to develop in students the ability to use language critically and flexibly, we must create the sorts of classrooms that position them as critical and flexible language users from the start.

Background: Makerspaces are proliferating U.S. public schools and libraries. Few studies, however, take an "in situ" view on the pedagogical moves of mentors, and fewer still engage with ideologies of race and class therein. Without this, principles of pedagogy or design that build toward expansive learning for racially minoritized youth will remain elusive. Methods: Semi-structured interviews and fieldnotes of mentors in a U.S. public library makerspace were taken over six weeks (n = 12). The mentors were predominantly white and all were professional artists/creatives; teen patrons were predominantly racially minoritized. Findings: Three recurring pedagogical moves surfaced through the interplay of prolepsis and telos as an interpretive lens. We identify how mentor history/memory and future imaginings of youth as adult creatives--both of which intersect with ideologies of race and class--shape their mediation of learning. Contributions: (1) Documentation of specific pedagogical moves that extend efforts to name the work of mentors; (2) Presentation of prolepsis and telos as a lens to recover the power of imagination in pedagogy; and (3) Extension of how prolepsis is used to the study human learning and development by bringing it in contact with the study of ideologies among educators.

In this study, we examine the unique and shared contributions of Spanish and English core academic language skills (CALS) to English reading comprehension in a population of Spanish-English dual language learners in Grades 4 and 5 (n = 165). We focus on cross-disciplinary CALS, operationalized as sets of high-utility lexical, syntactic and discourse resources prevalent in school texts. This study finds that Spanish and English CALS are positively and significantly related, and, further, that both sets of skills exert a unique positive influence on English reading comprehension. Aligned with an interpretation of linguistic interdependence between Spanish and English academic language skills, results document their cross-linguistic contribution to reading comprehension for students enrolled in educational programs that foster literacy and content learning regularly in two languages.

We charted how one educator's use of proleptic language--or language that invoked students' imagined future identities as if they are fully realized in the present--situated students in communities of academic and professional practice, both within the tangible community of the classroom and within those intangible communities consisting of college students, litigators, music producers, and activists which her students aspired to join. Students demonstrated transformative agency in aligning, resisting, and reinterpreting these proleptic bids, which appeared to create opportunities for students to engage in authentic uses of academic discourse as well as to develop critical rhetorical flexibility--or skill in using all language resources flexibly and critically as a part of participation in an array of social contexts. We suggest that the use of proleptic talk transforms the tenor of academic language instruction by centering students'--rather than teachers'--goals for language learning and by recognizing learners' past, present, and future selves.

Mid-adolescence is a period of considerable potential growth in the language for academic writing. Yet, to date, few writing studies explore language development during this period and even fewer focus on longitudinal or diverse samples. In this study, we examined the development of language skills for academic writing in a socio-economically diverse sample followed from sixth to seventh grade (n = 124). In each grade, participants wrote summaries of a science text. Subsequently, summaries were scored for writing quality (WQ) and analyzed for productive language skills (lexico-syntactic and discourse features). Participants completed a receptive academic language assessment and a test that measured reading comprehension of the source text. First, we examined if WQ or productive language skills changed over time. Next, we tested if Grade 6 productive and receptive language skills predicted Grade 7 WQ. Results revealed syntactic growth over time. Grade 6 use of connectives and receptive language skills emerged as predictors of Grade 7 WQ.

Classrooms are not always linguistically permeable, and instruction focused on bolstering English reading comprehension too often neglects students' additional linguistic resources in languages other than English. However, to the task of comprehending English text, multilingual readers bring a host of communicative resources across multiple languages. Indeed, recent studies have found that students educated concurrently in Spanish and English within bilingual schools possess positively correlated Spanish and English academic register resources, with academic register knowledge in each language making unique contributions toward explaining variability in these dual-language learners' English reading comprehension. This recent research offers the tantalizing insight that teaching students to notice overlaps in communicative expectations and linguistic patterns--or "register overlaps"--across Spanish and English academic registers should receive greater focus. Here, to speak to classroom application, we offer suggestions for how educators might use equivalent Spanish and English "metalanguages"--or language to talk about language--to highlight register overlaps in Spanish and English academic text. We contend that this purposeful noticing of register overlaps can deepen students' awareness of the linguistic resources available to them for comprehending academic texts and support them in developing "critical metalinguistic awareness," or the skills and habits of mind needed to critically consider how registers have been naturalized and are subject to change. This article supports educators to enact one aspect of translingual pedagogy that builds on students' observations about the language of school in order to increase linguistic flexibility, awareness, and criticality.

Academic discussion can create space for student voice and active negotiation of text meaning in the classroom. However, teachers hoping to use academic discussion may find it difficult to draw learners into these discussions if students do not feel a sense of agency--a particular concern for multilingual students or those designated as having limited or interrupted formal education, who may have shorter histories of participation in classroom discourse. In this article, we draw on observation, artifact, and interview data to explore an upper-elementary classroom of newcomer multilingual learners, where reflexive academic discussion serves as a foundational element of exploring and developing students' agency. The authors present instructional approaches reading educators can use to weave together reflexive and text-focused academic discussion in support of students' developing agency.

Purposeful academic conversation engages students as active agents in the process of making meaning from text, negotiating perspectives, and achieving mutual understanding. However, educators often report difficulties in engaging students in talk-based pedagogies. This concern can be partially addressed by ensuring that students and teachers have similar understandings regarding the purposes of academic conversation. Here, we examine the conceptions of academic conversation held by middle-school students and their teachers, revealing areas of convergence and divergence in the perspectives held by youth and their educators regarding the purposes of academic conversation and students' roles in these discussions. With direct relevance to instructional practice, we provide suggestions for making these understandings visible and reconciling divergent views.

Merging evidence from psychological models of reading comprehension, ethnographic research on language and literacy, and textual linguistics lines of research, the authors take the position that psychological models of reading comprehension often overlook written language comprehension and production as context-embedded, sociocultural processes. Using the example of academic language comprehension by middle grade learners, the authors present a series of studies that have informed the science of reading by making visible a precise set of high-utility academic language skills that support informational text comprehension during middle childhood (ages 9-14). Studies have suggested that these skills develop gradually throughout adolescence and significantly contribute to reading comprehension. Drawing on this research with the goal of informing the science of reading, the authors suggest that academic language comprehension involves for the reader (a) familiarity with a set of academic language forms commonly found in school texts, (b) experience with the sociocultural practices of understanding and using the academic language of text within a particular sociocultural community, and (c) aligning with or resisting the reader identities implied by the language of a text. The authors suggest that innovative research and pedagogical approaches are needed to broaden the conceptualization of language and reading comprehension relations from purely cognitive into one that embraces the reader's interaction with a text as a sociocultural phenomenon.

Learning to use language in order to complete source-based writing tasks is a challenge for middle grade writers worthy of additional study, especially given that these tasks are increasingly common in classrooms. Here, we examined the contribution of receptive and productive cross-disciplinary academic language skills to the writing quality of middle graders' science summaries, after accounting for students' sociodemographic characteristics, their comprehension of the science source text, and general summary features (i.e., length and copy ratio). Our results suggest that the ability to produce a high-quality science summary is predominately driven by the writers' receptive academic language proficiency, comprehension of the source text and productive academic language used when writing, including text length. We contend that these results are illuminating because of the joint examination of students' productive and receptive academic language skills. In addition, this study attempts to unpack the relation between summary length and quality, identifying levels of receptive academic language skills as an important moderator. These findings have the potential to advance the current understanding of malleable factors associated with science writing proficiency, as well as with those associated with source-based writing more generally.

Educators are increasingly aware of the role of classroom talk in cultivating students' language knowledge, which in turn supports their skilled reading comprehension. The result has been greater attention to teacher talk moves that transform class discussions into opportunities for language learning. However, less focus has been placed on the strategies used by students as they work together to both learn language and learn about language. The authors focus on a fourth-grade classroom in which students scaffold one another's language development through powerful language-focused talk, or metatalk, during a small-group vocabulary activity. By examining the characteristics of these metatalk episodes and delineating talk moves used by students within them, the authors make visible moves that educators might note and build from. This study informs instruction that capitalizes on the language knowledge held by individual learners in the service of collective language learning for all.

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual English and bilingual students designated as English learners (N = 7,152) from the United States. The study investigated the dimensionality of the core academic language skills construct, the reliability and validity of the CALS Instrument, and the impact of school grade on students' performance in core academic language skills. Results revealed the assessment measure to be unidimensional and to discriminate performance by grade level. This study offers insight into the value of measuring cross-disciplinary school-relevant language proficiency, delineates skills to be targeted through instruction to support reading comprehension, and offers a tool to identify students who will benefit most from this instruction.

To assess text comprehension and concept mastery, standards-aligned measures have moved from using multiple-choice questions to using source-based writing tasks (sometimes referred to as Reading-to-Write tasks). For example, it is now common for students to be asked to read a text and then to produce a written response, often a summary or argumentative essay. While this task involves comprehension of the source text, it remains unclear the degree to which these reading-to-write tasks also tap additional skills, such as academic language proficiency, which may support or hamper the writer's ability to convey information acquired from reading. Given the lack of research focused on this question, in this study, we examined whether variability in early adolescents' Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) contributes to the quality of their written summaries of science source texts. A total of 259 participants in grades four to eight were administered the "Core Academic Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I)" and the "Global Integrated Scenario-Based Assessment (GISA)," which included a reading comprehension test and a summary writing task, both based on the same scientific source text. Findings revealed that CALS, previously shown to be associated with reading comprehension, have a robust positive relation with early adolescents' science summary writing quality, predicting unique variance over and above students' source text comprehension and demographic characteristics. Results highlight the relevance of paying instructional attention not only to content but also to language skills when preparing students to become independent learners in a content area. In addition, these findings offer some evidence for CALS as a cross-modality construct relevant to both reading and writing at school.

Although many adolescents struggle to comprehend text, the school-relevant language skills, which might contribute to variation in reading comprehension ability during this developmental period, remain understudied. To expand the research base, this study examines the concurrent development of academic language skills and reading comprehension in a sample of emergent bilinguals (EBs) and their English proficient (EP) peers (n = 573) followed over two academic years, from Grade six to seven. Parallel process latent growth modeling results reveal that academic language and reading comprehension skills develop concurrently, with growth rates in Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) positively associated with growth rates in reading comprehension. Furthermore, initial levels of CALS predicted rates of growth in reading comprehension. We also find that EBs, who are by definition in the process of acquiring English, begin Grade six with CALS that are far below their peers, but develop these skills at similar rates as their EP classmates. Results reveal the potential for CALS-focused instruction for improving adolescent learners' reading comprehension development, and highlight the particular relevance of supporting CALS for EBs, who are tasked with acquiring the language of print at the same time as they are acquiring other registers of English.

Educators are aware of the need to promote students' academic language to support text comprehension. Yet, besides teaching academic vocabulary, many educators continue to ask, What would this instruction entail? Guided by a new framework known as core academic language skills (CALS), the authors' research focuses on delineating core language skills that contribute to reading comprehension to make them more visible to educators and researchers. In this article, findings from two studies are integrated to argue for a mixed-methods approach to advance academic language research and pedagogy. In study 1, the authors assessed upper elementary/middle school students' CALS and quantitatively examined the association between CALS and reading comprehension. In study 2, the authors used qualitative methods to collect and analyze students' oral reflections about academic language. Key findings from these studies and their implications for academic language pedagogy in today's schools are discussed.

Recent literacy research calls for pedagogical approaches that multiply students' opportunities to discuss texts and ideas that matter. We argue that understanding mid-adolescents' language needs can further inform discussion-based approaches. Our assessment research reveals that substantial differences in Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) – high-utility school-relevant language skills – help explain why comprehending school texts can be challenging for many adolescents. Our research with Latinx dual language learners' and their teachers documents how leveraging heritage languages and identities contributes to academic success. Integrating insights from our teacher-researcher collaborations, we call for practices and dispositions that amplify language resources and awareness and affirm students' voices by engaging teachers and students in reflecting about language, context, and power while scaffolding CALS across content areas and grades. Affirming while amplifying students' voices entails expanding students' and teachers' critical rhetorical flexibility, the ability to use language critically and flexibly for particular contexts and purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a long-standing awareness of academic language as a pedagogically relevant research area, the construct of academic-language proficiency, understood as a more comprehensive set of skills than just academic vocabulary, has remained vaguely specified. In this study, we explore a more inclusive operationalization of an academic-language proficiency construct, core academic-language skills ( CALS). CALS refers to a constellation of high-utility language skills hypothesized to support reading comprehension across school content areas. Using the Core Academic Language Skills Instrument ( CALS-I), a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust innovative tool, we first examined the variability in students' CALS by grade, English-proficiency designation, and socioeconomic status ( SES). Then, we examined the contribution of CALS to reading comprehension using academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic factors as covariates. A linguistically and socioeconomically diverse cross-sectional sample of 218 students (grades 4-6) participated in four assessments: the CALS-I, a standardized reading comprehension assessment (Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test), an academic vocabulary test (Vocabulary Association Test), and a word reading fluency test (Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency). General linear model analysis of variance revealed that CALS differed significantly by grade, English-proficiency designation, and SES, with students in higher grades, English-proficient students, and those from higher SES backgrounds displaying higher scores, on average. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified CALS as an independent predictor of reading comprehension, even after controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge, word reading fluency, and sociodemographic factors. By specifying a set of language skills associated with reading comprehension, this study advances our understanding of school-relevant language skills, making them more visible for researchers and educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]