Paola Uccelli

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Graduate School of Education

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS).CALSrefers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions that...

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high sc...

The sheer quantity of words known (breadth) is strongly predictive of reading comprehension, yet little is understood about how quality of word knowledge (depth) affects comprehension. A group of 35 bilingual and monolingual 5th-grade students worked on developing depth of knowledge of 8 words, culminating in an activity in which the students produ...

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners’ school-relevant language resources th...

Mid-adolescence has been identified as a period of considerable potential growth in the language skills and practices that support reading and writing at school, but little research has examined mid-adolescents’ use of connectives in school-relevant persuasive writing. In this study, we define connectives as cohesive devices that signal to a reader...

Although the relation between child-caregiver non-present talk and children’s language and literacy development has been extensively studied, scarce research has examined the contributions of teacher talk’s conceptual, interactive, and linguistic dimensions to early literacy. Using fine-grained linguistic analysis, lessons from 16 Chilean classroom...

Which theoretical and empirical insights can inform language‐in‐education research that advances equitable and high‐quality learning at school? In this three‐part article, I first draw from various sources to foreground the urgent need to counteract linguicism and epistemic injustices and to commit to more just and rigorous scientific practices in...

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading aims to measure reading comprehension for students in the United States and to monitor progress in our education system. NAEP Reading is developed based on an assessment framework document that is periodically revised to reflect the latest understandings about reading comprehension a...

Prior adolescent writing research typically used omnibus length-based measures, such as Mean Length of Clauses (MLC), to describe and evaluate students’ performance at constructing complex sentences. This study undertook to: (1) develop a novel approach, Diversity of Advanced Sentence Structures (DASS), with a more detailed inventory of students’ c...

Actualmente, el aprendizaje de la escritura académica se considera un requisito fundamental para desenvolverse adecuadamente en contextos especializados de comunicación. Sin embargo, muchos estudiantes llegan a la universidad sin las habilidades de lenguaje necesarias para participar exitosamente en actividades de aprendizaje y evaluación. Las nuev...

Academic practices often come into conflict with vernacular practices. However, from a sociocultural and pragmatic approach, it has been shown that language develops throughout education due to the children and young people’s participation across different permeable and interdependent communicative contexts. This thematic issue includes nine papers...

In writing science summaries, student writers frequently borrow language fragments from source texts. While taking a text’s ideas verbatim is commonly considered a failure in writers’ expected use of their own words or even plagiarism, imitating “linguistic chunks” from skilled speakers is also an effective practice in language development. This st...

In this cluster randomized control trial study, the authors explored the efficacy of an intervention designed to improve second‐grade English learners’ knowledge of challenging, high‐utility English vocabulary. The authors also examined whether the intervention had a differential effect on content words that differ on two attributes (cognate status...

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. Us...

The present study examines adolescent and adult English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) Learners’ linguistic complexity and register flexibility in writing across academic and colloquial contexts. A total of 263 EFL learners from three first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese, French, and Spanish) participated in this study. Each participant produced two...

Academic language skills support mid‐adolescents’ comprehension of the language of school texts. To date, scarce research has explored associations between dual academic language skills and reading comprehension among mid‐adolescent dual language immersion (DLI) students. This study examined individual differences in Spanish and English academic la...

Recently a novel instrument – the Core Academic Language Instrument (CALS-I) – aimed at testing a constellation of school-relevant English language skills was developed and validated for use in the United States (Uccelli, Barr, Dobbs, Galloway, Meneses and Sánchez, 2015. Core Academic Language Skills: An expanded operational construct and a novel i...

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 mid...

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 discours...

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...

With a sample of 7,752 fourth- to seventh-grade students in 25 schools which were randomized at the school level to condition, this article reports experimental impacts of an enhanced version of Word Generation on student outcomes at the end of Year 1 and of Year 2. Word Generation employs analysis, synthesis, critique, and problem-solving activiti...

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 diver...

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 En...

Cambridge Core - Applied Linguistics - Learning through Language - edited by Vibeke Grøver

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 argumenta...

Writers interact with readers using explicit signals of textual organization (e.g., firstly; however) and stance (e.g., possibly, surprisingly), known as metadiscourse markers (MDMs). Most metadiscourse studies, however, focus on academic writing exclusively, with minimal efforts comparing MDMs usage across communicative contexts. The present study...

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...

This study examines whether children's decontextualized talk—talk about nonpresent events, explanations, or pretend—at 30 months predicts seventh-grade academic language proficiency (age 12). Academic language (AL) refers to the language of school texts. AL proficiency has been identified as an important predictor of adolescent text comprehension....

Although literacy achievement has improved in Chile, adolescents’ underperformance in reading comprehension is still a serious concern. In English, core academic-language skills (CALS) have been found to significantly predict reading comprehension, even controlling for academic vocabulary knowledge. CALS are high-utility language skills that suppor...

Secondary-school learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in China constitute a rapidly growing yet understudied population. This study examined Chinese secondary-school EFL learners’ writing performance in two genres, argumentative essays and narratives. Crossgenre research on native language writing has documented that, at the macro-text l...

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 skill...

Deep reading comprehension refers to the process required to succeed at tasks defined by the Common Core State Literacy Standards, as well as to achieve proficiency on the more challenging reading tasks in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) framework. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that three skill domains...

Learning to write in middle school requires the expansion of sentence-level and discourse-level language skills. In this study, we investigated later language development in the writing of a cross-sectional sample of 235 upper elementary and middle school students (grades 4-8) by examining the use of (1) lexico-grammatical forms that support precis...

Multimodal composing is part of the Common Core vision of the twenty-first-century student. Two descriptive studies were conducted of fifth-grade students’ digital folktale retellings. Study 1 analyzed 83 retellings in relation to the types and frequencies of modal use, such as image, sound, movement, and written text, as well as their retelling ac...

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 pro...

Whereas mastering academic language (AL) contributes to school success, difficulty in school might be partially traced back to the gap between teachers’ linguistic expectations and the communicative norms to which students orient. Teachers, as experienced AL users, may implicitly hold linguistic expectations for speaking and writing in the classroo...

Beyond academic vocabulary, the constellation of skills that comprise academic language proficiency has remained imprecisely defined. This study proposes an expanded operationalization of this construct referred to as core academic language skills (CALS). CALS refers to the knowledge and deployment of a repertoire of language forms and functions th...

Given, on the one hand, the poor results obtained by Peruvian children in the national and international reading assessments. And on the other hand, the increased investment in technology for schools in the country, this study aimed to develop and test an online tool to improve reading comprehension. In order to do this, the reading comprehension s...

This study examined the relative contribution of reading comprehension strategies and interactive vocabulary in Improving Comprehension Online (ICON), a universally designed web-based scaffolded text environment designed to improve fifth-grade monolingual English and bilingual students’ reading achievement. Seventy-five monolingual English and 31 b...

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of an Internet-delivered universally designed depth of vocabulary intervention that targeted both English-speaking and Spanish–English-speaking students. Two hundred forty students, 49% of whom were Spanish–English bilinguals, participated in the 16-week intervention. Intervention students read...

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, tempora...

This chapter focuses on Spanish-speaking children’s evaluation and temporality in the construction of personal narratives. The study analyzes 32 personal narratives produced by 8 Andean Spanish-speaking children from the Andean city of Cusco in Peru. All children were monolingual speakers of the Andean Spanish variety and came from lower-middle-cla...

The Main Streams of Work in Educational LinguisticsWhat are the Desired Educational Outcomes?What do Teachers Need to Know about Language?How do We Foster the Desired Linguistic Outcomes for Students and Teachers?Conclusion

Research has identified English oral language proficiency as being critical for bilingual students' literacy development. This study examines developmental patterns and associations among oral vocabulary and narrative skills in a longitudinal sample of 24 Spanish/English bilingual children from low socioeconomic backgrounds so as to further our und...

Narrative attainment was assessed in a group of 76 four-year-old children at risk for brain injury because of histories of early corrective heart surgery. Elicited personal experience narratives were coded for narrative components, evaluative devices, and information adequacy and were contrasted with narratives produced by a comparison group of typ...

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2003. UMI # 3114082 Includes bibliographical references (leaves 234-239). Vita.