Socialization to Academic Language in a Kindergarten Classroom

Recognizing the importance of academic language for students' success in schools, this article reports on an investigation of how narrative-focused literacy events in the classroom provide opportunities for academic language socialization. Data were collected from one public elementary school in a major metropolitan area in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Participants include an intact kindergarten class of 16 students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and their teacher. The results of the investigation revealed that sharing time provides opportunities for socialization to academic register through: (1) requiring that students successfully navigate the academic language demands of the interaction, (2) providing differentiated teacher scaffolding that supports students in meeting these demands, and (3) building a linguistic third space. The author discusses how the data and results demonstrate that the roots of mature academic language register are in the emergent academic language used in early childhood classrooms.