Best Strategies for Academic VocabularyVirginia Dept. of Education
Title III Statewide Consortium Conference
Audrey Cohan, Ed.D. Molloy College
Rockville Centre, NY
Audrey_Cohan Created with Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld
Building Academic
Language in Every
Classroom
Gain ideas to foster student
interaction
Integrate the use of complex texts
to build language
Develop ways to enhance students’ language output
Create language objectives
Adapted from
Zwiers, 2012
AGENDA
What Is Academic Language?
• Negotiate a definition collectively
• Fortify your collective definition with examples from your own
practice
Why Is Academic Language So Difficult to Teach?
Why Is Academic Language So Difficult to Teach to English Language Learners? Challenge
Academic Language Focus
• Word-level
• Sentence-level
• Text-level
The Features of Academic Language
• Understanding
• Language Functions
• Word/Phrase level,
• Sentence level, and
• Discourse levels
• What exactly will the students
DO with the language in the
lesson and how will they
USE it?
From Jeff Zwiers
Public Service Announcements!
What would we say in 60 seconds?
What would you
tell content
teachers about the
features of
academic
language?
Debbie Zacarian
The Literacy Suitcase…..Literacy behaviors of learners who carry academic language and can be symbolized as the suitcase students carry in and out of school.
The suitcase is filled with rich vocabulary, cultural ways of being and acting, decision-making skills, or dialect skills. (Ex: storytelling skills, family traditions, gospel songs or novellas)
Academic Language: Word Level
Stop & Process
How do you support
word-level academic language development?
Tiered Vocabulary Instruction
Tier 1 Basic words
—feel, mad, good, speak
Tier 2 High frequency, but challenging words
—investigate, expectation, clarify, explain, analyze
Tier 3 Infrequently used words that are often discipline-specific
—evaporation, pupa, federal, simile
Two Essential Criteria for Choosing Target Words
• Importance and Utility
MILEAGE
• Conceptual Understanding
POWER
PAINT CHIP VOCABULARY CARDS https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/build-student-vocabulary
TALK IN 2s & 3s
17
What SQUARES
with my beliefs
What’s going
AROUND
in my head
THREE POINTS
I want to remember
18