Developing Specialist Language Styles: Research and Application

This resource is for teachers who want to know what features of specialist language cause problems for their students and would like help in deciding what they should do about them.

The resource comes in two parts – this book and a website.

This book describes the results of extensive research into secondary school student language difficulties with science text. It also serves as a guide to the web-based component of the resource. The book serves as a model for increasing student access to other specialist language styles and to science at higher levels.

The website, thinkliteracy.com, is built around a system for diagnosing language features that are causing problems for particular students. Once the language difficulties have been identified the system will produce individual and class reports, and construct a worksheet consisting of exercises chosen specifically to target each individual student's difficulties. The site allows users to mount their own tests and replicate the research at its heart in their own subject areas. Both book and website are useful beyond secondary school science classes.

Resource development was partially supported by a number of grants from the University of Newcastle, Australia.

"The research section of the publication serves as point of departure for the theoretical manifestation of certain language-related principles and practices. This is logically followed by a number of strategies students could become engaged in when focussing on language development. Exercises follow the
suggested strategies and the final web-based activities link appropriately to the rest of the text. … It provides a sound base for managing language and language development".
Prof William J. Fraser, University of Pretoria (South Africa)

"The task design makes use of the findings about the learners' difficulties occurring in the cloze test and combines it with a genre approach to offer a great variety of exercises covering all levels from the word,phrase, sentence, paragraph to text. … Both book and website offer rich resources for a mainstream teacher for diagnosis and hands-on exercises for the learners to overcome their language difficulties by practising and awareness raising with the help of pragmatic explanations"
Prof Dr Rita Kupetz, Leibniz University Hannover (Germany)