We are all perhaps familiar with the two-part adage learning to read and reading to learn, but how often do we recognize how the two can really be one? In a recent visit to a first grade classroom, I had the opportunity to witness a teacher instructing students on the use of graphs for representing data.

The word estimate popped up early in her explanation of the math assignment, and while these young students were not expected to be able to read this word, a discussion ensued rich in the language of mathematics. Students volunteered guessing, testing and tallying as equivalent terms they had learned during a previous discussion of the concept of estimation. In the activities that followed, the students encountered the word tally in print as they read aloud the instructions for the assignment with their teacher. This brief cameo of the intersection of mathematics with literacy instruction illustrates the potential all teachers have for consciously integrating literacy across the curriculum. Building a strong vocabulary in a content area will not only help students to learn key concepts in that domain, but by making the link to print, this instruction can also promote literacy beyond the usual language arts instruction.

All students are language learners in one way or another. No five-year-old arrives in kindergarten a fully proficient speaker of English, and no 13-year-old starts eighth grade as a fully proficient reader of English. Indeed, in kindergarten both oral language skills and the basics of reading have to be learned. In terms of oral language, by some estimates the vocabularies of elementary students grow by 3,000 new words in each grade. Beyond the level of word learning, these young children are learning to form the structure of stories to make their discourse coherent to a listener. They have also yet to learn the rules for language use, such as when it is permissible to shout out an answer in class and when to listen quietly to the contributions of their teacher or classmates. In terms of reading, these five-year-olds are learning to decode language as it is represented on the printed page by forming correspondences between letters and the sounds they stand for in spoken English. If those sounds are familiar in the sense that they map onto a known word in the student‰s vocabulary then reading for meaning is achieved. For example, reading the letters h, a, and t will be made all the more straight forward if a student knows already from oral language development that this is the label for a piece of clothing worn on the head.

In the later grades, in fact throughout our entire adult lives, the biggest contribution to vocabulary growth is made by reading. Some of this will be the specialized vocabulary of different content areas, such as integral, sine wave, osmosis, impeachment. But many new words acquired by reading fall into the no-man‰s land between the language arts curriculum and the curricula of the different content areas. But neither is this the language of everyday conversation. It is the language of academics that does duty across content areas yet doesn‰t necessarily get explicitly taught in the classroom. Evaluate, justify, synthesize, integrate, expound, deduce are words that exemplify the notion of academic language, along with the parts of words that give older students the building blocks for expanding both their vocabulary and learning of concepts, such as -ize, -ism, -er, and -ist added to the words formal, dual, evict, and creation.

Perhaps the best known program for instructing students in academic language is CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach) by Ana Uhl Chamot and J. Michael O‰Malley. This program is designed to teach reading, writing, speaking and listening skills to students with English as a second language within the mathematics, science, social studies and language arts curricula. However, I have yet to come across any teacher who has not found something of merit in this program for students who are native speakers of English. The CALLA approach translates research on cognition and language development into a program that focuses on the integration of academic language and explicit instruction in learning strategies with content area instruction. A second major focus is professional development in academic language teaching and assessment. If we accept reading as one of four key language skills, and if we learn to view all our students as language learners, the CALLA approach to teaching literacy across content areas is one approach that can guide future practice in reading instruction.