Content area
Full Text
The present study explores the development of academic language and social studies discourse norms among a diverse sample of middle school students, as well as how language development aids rhetorical choices in students' writing. Over the course of 1 semester, students (n = 37) made statistically and practically significant gains in academic language, and those gains were related to rhetorically stronger writing samples. This indepth view of middle school students' academic language in social studies is instructive for both professional development and pedagogical decision-making. Furthermore, the patterns of performance and description of how students use linguistic features characteristic of academic language, in general and in social studies discourse specifically, advance understanding of the connections between rhetoric and disciplinary literacy. Finally, the findings provide clarity as to how students use specific features of academic language to compose an extended definition of a discipline-specific word.
BACKGROUND
Driven by the goal of college and career readiness for students, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have expanded literacy education to incorporate disciplinary literacy in P12 education (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010). Several scholars have noted how this new shift to teaching reading and writing in multiple disciplines is grounded in both the goals of the CCSS and various sets of standards associated with the use of rhetoric (Collin, 2013; Ramos, 2014), and in particular, rhetoric's subfield of writing in the disciplines (Whitehead & Murphy, 2014). These scholars have explored how students writing in their disciplines must attend to different audiences, purposes, and genres-the contexts that comprise rhetorical situations-such as writing a lab report in the sciences (Whitehead & Murphy, 2014).
In particular, the CCSS writing standards for history/social studies, science, and technical subjects "focus students' attention on the ways different contexts-including different disciplines, tasks, audiences, and purposes- call for different types of communication" (Collin, 2013, pp. 216-217), meaning students must attend to the rhetorical situation when writing. Specifically, CCSS standard WHST.2d requires students to "Use precise language and domain-specific vocabulary ... to manage the complexity of the topic and convey a style appropriate to the discipline and context as well as to the expertise of likely readers" (History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects Standards/Writing, 2012). Per this standard, students must write to expert audiences in the language...