The use of academic language markers in middle grade persuasive essays

Middle school students face a daunting challenge of learning to effectively write using academic language, while they are simultaneously learning content they are expected to synthesize and reflect in that writing. Though strong academic writing skills serve as an important gatekeeper to success in the secondary grades and beyond, few studies have investigated how students develop these academic language skills. In these studies, I investigated three important features of the written academic language use, academic vocabulary, organizational markers, and stance markers, in a sample of persuasive essays (n=664) written by middle grade students (n=167) who participated in a supplemental vocabulary development program. The dataset, which featured multiple essays on various topics by each student, was analyzed in order to document how writers use language features across topical contexts. In the first study, I described the frequency and quality of uses of academic vocabulary words taught throughout the program, and analyzed how academic vocabulary use was related to overall essay writing quality. Students attempted to use the taught vocabulary frequently. Using multilevel modeling, I detected a significant relationship between the quality of vocabulary uses and overall writing quality.

In the second study, I examined students' uses of markers of organization (e.g. conclusion markers, transition markers) and stance (e.g. epistemic markers, engagement markers) and the relationships of these markers to overall writing quality. Again using multilevel modeling, I found that two types of emergent organizational markers had a significant negative relationship to overall writing quality, and the total number of stance markers had a small but significant positive relationship with overall writing quality that was stronger in shorter essays. Taken together, these studies suggest that students are making many attempts to use various academic language features in their written essays, and have an emerging understanding about how to use academic language features effectively. The students' emergent efforts to use academic language features suggest the potential of explicit instruction together with frequent exposure to academic language uses to improve students' persuasive writing.