Second Language Academic Literacies: Converging Understandings
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SECOND LANGUAGE ACADEMIC LITERACIES: CONVERGING UNDERSTANDINGS
INTRODUCTION
Increasingly schools and universities in many parts of the world are expected to serve ethnically and linguistically diverse students. Scholarly discussions on language and literacy education have, however, tended to maintain either a first language or a second language stance in some mutually insulating way. This intellectual divide was perhaps fostered by the educational and intellectual climate that prevailed in an earlier historical period. In the past 30 years or so, however, public educational institutions have been made progressively more conscious of the need and the obligation to serve diverse student populations under the aegis of marketization of education provision for international students, and/or social integration for all students, irrespective of their language backgrounds. It is recognized that many linguistic minority students find the use of their second language for academic purposes problematic (Cummins, 2000; Leung and Safford, 2005; Mohan, Leung and Davison, 2001; Scarcella, 2003). The ability to communicate informally for social purposes in a second language, even at high levels of lexico-grammatical accuracy and pragmatic familiarity, does not automatically translate into effective academic use, particularly in relation to reading and writing. A good deal of discussion in second language curriculum and pedagogy is focussed on this ‘problem’. In this discussion, my main focus is on the use of second language in academic discourse (with particular reference to written discourse) because it highlights a profound conceptual issue in the prevailing notions of second language competence. I explore this not just as a teaching issue, but also as a conceptual and research issue. In this chapter, I use the terms ‘second language pedagogy’ and ‘academic literacy’ in a broad sense and refer to relevant teaching and curriculum literature covering a range of educational settings (e.g. school, college and work-based programmes) and students (e.g. schoolaged and adult).1 Perhaps it would be useful to point out that there are Traditionally in the English-speaking education systems, the term ‘English as a second language’ (ESL) is often used to refer to a context of use and/or learning where English is the medium of communication for at least some public or government
1
B. V. Street and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: Literacy, 145–161. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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C O N S TA N T L E U N G
some discipline-specific ways in which the terms ‘language’ and ‘literacy/ literacies’ are interpreted. In the second language literature the term ‘language’ has tended to be used as a general catch-all label to include the development and use of language for listening, speaking, reading and writing (the so-called four basic skills); the second language lexico-grammar system and (often generalized) pragmatic rules of use form the basis of most curricular specifications. C
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