1. The Special Demands of Academic Language
Charles Temple, Ph.D.
Hobart & William Smith Colleges
For the
Literacy in Developing Countries Special Interest Group Newsletter
December 30, 2015
Many of the literacy projects I’ve worked with in Africa have shared the aims of
developing children’s reading fluency and comprehension. They addressed fluency by
providing child-friendly and engaging trade books in local languages, and also showing
teachers creative rereading activities. They addressed comprehension by following
constructivist strategies, like asking children what they know about a topic and eliciting
questions from them, guiding their inquiry as they read to seek answers, and following
up the reading with discussions and other strategies to drive the meaning home. These
projects have had a friendly relationship with EGRA and EGRA-inspired initiatives,
leaving it to them to develop children’s more basic skills like phonological awareness
and phonics.

2. My faith in the projects I just described dimmed just a bit last month, though, on a visit
to a rural primary school outside Kumasi, Ghana.
Here’s the scenario. The teacher is doing a KWL (Know-Want to Know-Learn) activity,
using a textbook text about the water cycle. When he asks students what they know
about water, they say, “It’s wet.” “We swim in it.” “We drink it.” “Sometimes it’s dirty.”
When he asks them what they want to know about water, they ask “How can we make it
clean?” and (here comes my favorite--) “Why can’t water walk?”
Now it’s time to read the text. The teacher apologizes to the project trainer and me
because he will have to read the text and explain it to the students, because they won’t
understand it otherwise. I look at the text and realize he’s probably right. The text says
something like (the following is from memory):
The Water Cycle
Water is converted into vapour through the processes of evaporation from
streams, lakes, and oceans; respiration from animals and humans; and
transpiration from plants. The vapour rises into the atmosphere where cooler

3. temperatures cause the process of condensation, resulting in the formation of
clouds and eventually in precipitation, by means of which water returns to the
surface of the earth.
One thing I notice about the textbooks in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa is that
compared to our textbooks in North America they are short, and use highly condensed
language to cover their topics. But the problem would be the same to some extent in any
science or social studies textbook. Content area textbooks use language that can differ
starkly from the language of stories, or from the spoken language of native speakers.
To illustrate some of these differences, I invite you to examine a passage from a fifth
grade Ghanaian science textbook (this one is actual--not from memory):
Light Energy
Our main source of light energy is the sun.
Light energy can be produced by electric
bulbs, lighted candles, hurricane lamps, and
glowing torches.
Light energy enables us to see.
Light energy is also used by plants to make
their food. Without sunlight plants will die
and animals that feed on plants will also
die. Light energy is, therefore, very
important to living things.
Electrical Energy
Electrical energy is obtained from electricity,
batteries, and electrical generators. We use
electrical energy to run many domestic
appliances such as electric lamps, radios,
fans, televisions, refrigerators, and irons. Electrical energy is also used in factories for the
manufacture of various products.
This passage is riddled with examples of academic English: words, phrases, and
sentence structures that are found exclusively in written academic texts and
almost never heard in everyday speech. A student can be a competent speaker of
English and a capable reader of stories, and still be baffled when it comes time to
make sense of written academic English. Some of the main challenges of
academic English are these:
1) Nominalizations. Words like manufacture in this text (as in “the manufacture of
various products”), or transpiration, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation
that were used in the P5 lesson I observed, take a complicated activity or process
and sum it up in a single word. Such words take unpacking and explaining for
students to understand them.

4. 2) The Passive Voice. Sentences like “Electrical energy is obtained from
electricity…” are structured very differently from the Subject—Verb—Object
sentences we normally use in speech.
3) Cohesive Devices. Academic texts use certain phrases to signal the relationships
between ideas. The word therefore in “Light energy is, therefore, very important
to living things” tells readers that for the reasons mentioned earlier the result
mentioned next should follow. The phrase such as in “We use electrical energy to
run many domestic appliances such as electric lamps, radios, fans…” signals that
electric lamps, radios, fans are examples of domestic appliances.
4) Technical Terms. Words like light energy and electrical generators, as well as
transpiration, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, are special terms that
we normally use in the domain of science.
5) Non-Technical “Tier Two Words.” Terms such as enables, obtained, domestic,
appliances, various, and products are not specialized science terms, but they are
rarely used in everyday speech.
How will students be able to navigate these challenges? The constructivist strategies the fifth
grade teacher was using were not fully up to the job. And the many colorful children’s storybooks
the project had provided these children, written in both the local language Twi and in English,
don’t offer much of a ramp up to the demands of academic language, either.
These things matter, because although they are initially taught in home languages, students in
Ghana need to understand written academic English in order to pass school leaving examinations
out of primary school. And they will need it in order to thrive in secondary school. The same is
true in Tanzania, where the language of schooling shifts from Kiswahili to English in secondary
school. In most (or all?) countries in Africa secondary and tertiary education is conducted in a
European language—English, French, or Portuguese. There are robust trends to conduct primary
education in children’s home languages. There are strong grounds for home language education,
certainly. But for those students who will continue their education, there is a need to help them
not only make the transition to a European language, but to an academic register.