Moving from the informal to the academic

Prompt: Why do you think it's difficult for some students move from informal oral language to written academic language? 

I think it is difficult for some students to master written academic language just because people are generally unconscious about the way that they use language. I don’t mean to say that this is their fault; what I mean to say is that language is such an ingrained aspect of a person’s personality that most people don’t notice much about it.

My wife is an example of this.  She is Japanese, and she came to the US when she was 10, so she acquired both Japanese and English naturally.  I tried studying Japanese a few years ago, and would ask her basic grammar questions, and she would have no idea what I was talking about. She had never thought about it, and was not really interested in thinking about it on the day that I asked her.  I am an analytical language learner, so it was frustrating to me sometimes, but it was clear to me that we learned language in different ways.

Today she is a successful manager in a large organization, and she has to write long, complicated documents in a specific genre. It was hard for her at first, but her boss was patient with her small (ear-learner) mistakes. She had to find a way to pull back a little and get some objectivity about her language and the way she was expected to write. Once she was able to do that, she was able to teach herself to write very well in the formal genre used in business.

This is exactly how I hope to help students acquire what is essentially a different dialect of English. I hope I can bring some new perspective to the way they look at their language, so that they can understand language in a new way, and use that understanding to shift into formal written English when necessary.