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Investigating 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
Session Objectives
In today’s session we will:
• Discover new aspects of academic language to
meet the needs of ELLs;
• Consider ways to create multiple opportunities for
students to use academic language;
•Learn strategies for the word, sentence, and
discourse levels.
What do teachers need to work effectively with ELLs? (Rojas, 2001)
SLA
Empathy
Strategies and techniques
Quick Write or Quick Draw
Teaching academic language to my students is like __________________________________ because__________________________________________________________.
Definitions of AL offered by several educational researchers:
• “...the language that is used by teachers and students for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills...imparting new information, describing abstract ideas, and developing students’ conceptual understandings” (Chamot & O’Malley, 1994, p. 40).
• “...word knowledge that makes it possible for students to engage with, produce, and talk about texts that are valued in school” (Flynt & Brozo, 2008, p. 500).
• “Academic English is the language of the classroom, of academic disciplines (science, history, literary analysis) of texts and literature, and of extended, reasoned discourse. It is more abstract and decontextualized than conversational English” (Gersten, Baker, Shanahan, Linan-Thompson, Collins, & Scarcella, 2007, p. 16).
• “Academic language is the set of words, grammar, and organizational strategies used to describe complex ideas, higher-order thinking processes, and abstract concepts” (Zwiers, 2008, p. 20).
Features of Academic Language
Word/Phrase
Sentence
Discourse
• General, specific, transitional, and technical
language
• Words and phrases with multiple meanings
• Formulaic and idiomatic expressions
• Collocations, nuances, and shades of meaning
• Types and varieties of grammatical structures
• Conventions, mechanics, and fluency
• Match of language forms to purpose/perspective
• Amount of speech/written text
• Structure of speech/written text
• Density of speech/written text
• Organization and cohesion of ideas (thinking)
• Variety of sentences and sentence types
Which words do I teach?
Tier 2
Tier 1
Tier 3
Common every day
words that many
students know
well.
Words that appear in a single
context, often domain-
specific/technical vocabulary
that often needs to be
explicitly taught.
High-utility words that occur in many
contexts, may have multiple meanings, and
are used to process Information. The
“power” behind students’ curricular
connections.
Read It, Say It, Write It
• “What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.”(Cisneros, Sandra. “Eleven.” Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1991. CCSS Appendix B, p. 87).
Read It, Say It, Write It
• Students can use the following sentence frame borrowed from Cisneros to discuss their own experiences of being an adolescent, the member of a sports team, or any other challenges they face:
• What they don’t understand about ____________________ and what they never tell you is that ____________________.
Tricolon
• A series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses.
• Words such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.“
• Phrases such as "government of the people, by the people, for the people."
Famous Speech
• If there is anyone out there [1] who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; [2] who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; [3] who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
The Magic of ThreeThree nouns (or adjective-noun combinations):
______________________, _______________________,
and ____________________________ swam by us in the
aquarium.
Three verbs:
I was ____________________, _____________________,
and ________________________________ in the park.
Three parallel phrases:
At school, it’s important to
_____________________________________,
___________________________________, and
____________________________.
Supporting Language
Functions • Acknowldeging ideas:
– My idea is similar to _____
– I agree/disagree with ______ because
– My response to _______ builds upon _______
– As it has been established by others, _____________
– As previously mentioned, ____________
• Synthesizing:
– The main points expressed in these poems are ______
– The significance of ________ is ____________
– The notion of _______ can be expressed as _______
– From my perspective, what these poems mean is _____