The symposium will address an important and unresolved issue at the forefront of educational and didactic research, namely the role of subject literacy for success in school and how to develop and support it within all learners. Thus a broad notion and understanding of language, of semiotics and of discourse competence as well as of literacy will be established, underlying all thinking and learning, including subject-specific ways of constructing meaning, of dealing with tasks in school and of interacting in the classroom.

 Based on research in several countries (among them Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the US) the symposium will deal with the specific language register used at school and the linguistic-communicative dimensions of school subjects or domains like history, social studies or the sciences. In particular, it will identify what academic language requirements are like, illustrate some of their features and describe them in theoretical terms. The different presenters will draw on empirical studies and their own experience so that many examples will be provided for the notions at hand.

 The symposium will also deal with the fact that the language of schooling (Schleppegrell 2004, Council of Europe 2009) needs to be explicitly defined for teachers and students alike, per subject as well as across the curriculum. And these language competences also need to be explicitly taught to learners as part of their content knowledge and subject competence. Otherwise they would remain more or less secret, as part of a hidden curriculum which makes those learners fail who are not aware of these implicit demands and who are not yet (fully) equipped to meet these cognitive-linguistic challenges. All students independent of their background are entitled to access and acquire the necessary academic language use and to claim their right to quality education including the mastery of the school language.

In this context, some of the implications of this analysis for teachers, students, curriculum planners and teacher educators will be discussed. The overall goal is not to have every subject teacher also become a language teacher, but rather to make them language-sensitive and offer the students to profit maximally from the curriculum, to participate actively in the acquisition of their knowledge and thinking skills and to experience relevance in terms of meaning/application for everyday life, for their future jobs/professions and for social uses of the knowledge, procedures and skills acquired. This is particularly important for “vulnerable learners” (a term used by the Council of Europe) including slow learners from disadvantaged families and those with a migrant background.

 Finally, some pedagogical issues will be raised: How can subject literacy be developed and supported within the classroom, how can a focus on content teaching best be combined with academic language learning, how can central language functions and text types (genres) be possibly transferred from one subject to another? The answer to questions like these will decide over the relative success in dealing with school language and in teaching subject literacies as a minimal right and requirement for each and everyone.