The Language of Texts

Academic language, whether oral or written, is more cognitively demanding than the language of everyday interaction, where the situation helps clarify meaning. Certain vocabulary, grammatical structures, and figures of speech occur more typically in writing than in speaking, even in children's books.

By analyzing features of language in the texts students are reading, teachers can draw their students' attention to aspects of text that might present difficulty. These aspects of expository text can offer challenges:

Vocabulary—the multiple meanings and uses of words; choice of words reflecting subtle gradations of meaning for effect; choice of words for precision. For example, glimpse and catch sight of are very similar in meaning, but in context one might be preferred over the other to convey a notion precisely or evocatively.

Grammatical structures—the means for organizing sentences and foregrounding or backgrounding ideas. For example, placing information in a relative clause is a way of backgrounding it: He wrecked the car that he bought last week. The focus is on wrecking rather than buying.

Cohesive devices—the grammatical means for linking ideas into larger, coherent discourse. Transition words such as but and even so serve this function.

Rhetorical devices—the grammatical means for structuring texts into effective discourse. In the TIME Magazine excerpt, the novel structure "bluest of chips" gets the reader's attention.

Phraseological patterning—natural, idiomatic, or preferred ways of expressing ideas in the language, without which text could be grammatical but nonetheless not natural—the elusive stuff of really knowing a language.    next

(Based on work by Lily Wong Fillmore, published in Why Reading Is Hard: Viewers Guide (p. 48), by Nancy Clair,
© 2002 Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems Co., Inc. Used with permission.)