So Just What Is the Academic Language of Mathematics

As I mentioned in my last article, there was a time, not so many years ago, when Englishlanguage learners (ELLs) were routinely placed into math class as their first all-English subject.The belief that ELLs would be able to do math easily because it was "nonverbal" was pervasive.Today, that has changed. Almost all ESL and math teachers now recognize that coming tounderstand mathematics is a verbal undertaking. Lack of proficiency in the academic language ofmathematics is one of the reasons that students who appear to be fluent in English still havedifficulty achieving in mathematics.But exactly what is it that causes the difficulty? Many ESL teachers have a general understandingof the difference between conversational language and academic language. They are familiar withCummins' distinction between basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitiveacademic language proficiency (CALP) (Cummins, 1979), and they know that what makesacademic language difficult is its increased cognitive complexity and decreased contextual support.But many teachers can't translate that general understanding into the ability to identify specificlanguage difficulties for math, or for any other subject. If you show them a lesson from a textbookand ask them to identify language difficulties, they will pick out a few multisyllabic vocabularywords, ignoring the common multiple-meaning words that can cause more difficulty, or the passiveverb constructions, or the connecting words that indicate relationships between parts of asentence.While the BICS and CALP distinction can be helpful in a general way, the concept of linguisticregister is more useful when thinking about the details of academic language. In linguistics, aregister is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.Imagine the conversation of a graduate student relaxing with friends at a local pub on a Saturdaynight. Now picture the same student during the oral defense of her dissertation on Mondaymorning. Even if she is talking about her dissertation in both situations, the differences in purposeand social setting will result in very obvious differences in word choice, sentence structure, anddiscourse patterns.The register of academic language generally includes features that are used across all academicsubjects; each particular subject then has additional features of its own. Features can includepronunciation, intonation, words chosen or not chosen, particular meanings of words, preferredsentence structures, accepted discourse patterns, common ways of accomplishing functions oflanguage, and pragmatic rules. This article will take a closer look at some of the features of theregister of academic math language that cause particular difficulty for English language learners.