Language Diversity, School Learning, and Closing Achievement Gaps A Workshop Summary (2010) / Chapter Skim
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Of particular interest was the degree to which group differences in school achievement might be attributed to language differences, and whether languagerelated instruction might help to close gaps in achievement by helping students cope with languageintensive subject matter, especially after the 3rd grade. The workshop was held at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the sponsoring organization, and provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to review and discuss relevant research findings from varied perspectives.
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CONTEXT: THE ACHIEVEMENT GAPS A simple observation motivated this workshop: Students vary con siderably in educational attainment, and student achievement varies with language background. However, that simple observation leads to many questions about the nature of this relationship and to the interest in reviewing the empirical data on several factors: language differences and how they develop; current understandings about "academic language" (the language of schooling)
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, 2009 Grade 4 8 Domain and Group 1998 2009 1998 2009 Reading Eligible 196 206 245 249 Not eligible 227 232 269 273 Mathematics Eligible 207 227 250 266 Not eligible 232 250 277 294 NOTE: Assessment scale scores range from 0 to 500. SOURCE: Data from National Assessment of Educational Progress (2009)
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The immediate objective of this workshop, however, was to explore how language and linguistic differences might be contributing to documented achievement disparities, and as part of this, how to better support lan guage for academic learning. A somewhat related controversy in the fields of linguistics and lan guage development stems from cognitive versus sociocultural views of learning and language: the former points to the merits of explicit instruc tion of grammatical forms; the latter points to implicit approaches that emphasize embedding instruction in meaningful social interaction, with less emphasis on grammatical accuracy or explicit attention to gram matical form.
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Thus, despite the impor tance of vocabulary to schooling, exploring richer ways to define and study language such as that offered by "academic language" and various other psycholinguistic approaches appeared warranted. Moreover, little research has focused on how such aspects of language might affect the "4th grade slump" commonly observed when students begin to encoun ter challenging academic content and reading material, and the focus of instruction largely shifts from learning to read to reading to learn.
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