ABSTRACT
Students like David skilfully negotiate their path through the school day. With a broad academic vocabulary, he would go from computer science and onto chemistry, facing its lengthy word equations to exemplify neutralisation, then onto German, with its vast array of new German words, before moving onto mathematics, with its unique combination of words, symbols, numbers, equations and graphs. David represents those many privileged children who have cracked the academic code of school. The differences between everyday talk and the complexity of academic talk then are stark and our obligation to teach academic vocabulary is obvious. Primarily, teacher talk needs to model, guide and instruct academic talk and vocabulary use. Linguistic experts have thought long and hard about how to best organise academic vocabulary, charting which words prove more important to reading and the academic code of school. Discourse markers are the cohesive glue of academic talk.
