Assessing use of transition markers in academic language of young Indian ESL learners

The interdisciplinarity of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and World Englishes (WE) has been instrumental in teaching cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) in the language, as distinct from basic interpersonal conversational skills (BICS), and in preparing learners of English to become global citizens. The knowledge and use of academic language proficiency of English in oral and written modalities, expected to be exhibited by young learners enrolled in secondary grades, has a significant role to play in their school success. In this chapter, we report a study on young Indian learners’ use of academic language as represented in their use of transition markers, which is taken as a measure of the lexical quality of their oral recall summaries. The summary responses arranged as a mini-corpus were analyzed to examine occurrences of semantic classes of transition markers and their distribution in two text types – narratives and expository texts and how this relates to the academic language proficiency of the young learners. The findings from the study have pedagogical implications for creating textbook-based and learner corpora to draw estimates of the presence and use of transition markers as cohesion and metadiscoursal devices in the academic language of ESL/EFL learners.