Academic language is a meta-language that helps learners acquire the 50,000 words they are expected to have internalized by the end of high school and includes everything from illustration and chart literacy to speaking, grammar, and genres within fields.

Think of academic language as the verbal clothing that we don in classrooms and other formal contexts to demonstrate cognition within cultures and to signal college readiness. There are two major kinds: instructional language (“What textual clues support your analysis?”) and language of the discipline (examples include alliteration in language arts, axiom in math, class struggle in social studies, and atom in science). No student comes to school adept in academic discourse—thus, thoughtful instruction is required.

• Todd Finley