The current focus across the U.S. on student college and career readiness standards makes clear that both instruction and assessment of academic English will continue to be important for school-age English learner (EL) students. This article presents an overview and summary of key literature on academic language (usually academic English);…

The work we report focuses on utilizing linguistic profiles of mathematics, science and social studies textbook selections for the creation of reading test specifications. Once we determined that a text and associated tasks fit within the parameters established in Butler et al. (2004), they underwent both internal and external review by language…

Within an evidentiary framework for operationally defining academic English language proficiency (AELP), linguistic analyses of standards, classroom discourse, and textbooks have led to specifications for assessment of AELP. The test development process described here is novel due to the emphasis on using linguistic profiles to inform the …