Category: Academic Language

Academic Language

Accelerating Academic Language Development: Six Key Strategies for Teachers of English Learners

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What I love about this academic language resource is that for each of the six key strategies, it gives examples of how to use the strategies to teach content knowledge AND academic language, then gives sample activities and assessments for each strategy. The first three pages discuss the background behind the creation of the six key strategies, while the last two pages focus on the six key strategies and what they would look like in a classroom.

If you want to learn more ways to build academic language, this link takes you to ten tools to get your ELLs talking in the classroom while building their academic language.

Academic Language, Linguistics

Math word problems are challenging for all of our students, especially our ELLs. They require students to read and comprehend a problem, determine the essential versus non-essential information, figure out what the problem is asking you to solve for, and finally determine the operation(s) needed to get to the answer. Below are some helpful articles and a keywords graphic that can help make all of your students successful.

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This Key Words Document could make a great anchor chart and/or reference page for your classroom. Of course, it is important to note that key words are only a hint to help you solve word problems, and they will not work in every word problem you will see. If students solely rely on key words, rather than trying to understand the problem, they will inadvertently make mistakes. That being said, they are a great way to build math academic language and are a great starting point for speaking and writing about mathematics. If you would like to tweak the document to make it more appropriate for your grade-level, just send me a request to edit.

This article, Reading and Understanding Written Math Problems does a great job of explaining suggested activities to help your students solve word problems and also has a video that explains how vocabulary can get in the way of solving a word problem.

This article, Translating Key Words also has lots of helpful hints about how to teach your students to solve word problems.

Academic Language

“Language objectives equip ELLs with the language skills they need to accomplish the goals of the lesson and communicate about the content using academic language.”

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Do you want to know the difference between content and language objectives and how you can easily incorporate them into your classroom? This short video does a great job explaining the difference and how to pair content and language objectives in different content areas.

“Everything that we teach kids and expect them to do is through the medium of language. It’s listening; it’s responding, it’s reading, it’s writing“

Language objectives are essential for our ESL students, but they are good for ALL students. Read this short article to learn more about how to use content and language objectives in your classroom and why they are so powerful for all students.

Academic Language

Number Talks-Help Children Communicate Their Math Thinking

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Giving students opportunities to communicate their thinking about mathematics helps to build academic vocabulary, builds oral language skills, listening skills, and promotes metacognition. Number talks are a WONDERFUL way to engage in accountable mathematical talk, while informally assessing your students’ understanding of math concepts. The links below are an entire year’s worth of 4th grade number talks that I purchased from Teachers Pay Teachers and printable number talks posters.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11JhQ56XpBdann9qrezZkcAYZIGt-PGMD/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wcf0uBXrrjliyxxWfu-S59nZAZc1jea2/view?usp=sharing

Academic Language, Good Reads

Practical Strategies to Improve Academic Discussions

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Being able to engage in academic conversations and write using academic language can be challenging for our ESL students. This resources gives easy to use suggestions and strategies to improve academic discussions in the classroom. It includes communicative language strategies and sentence frames.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SZjKJnuV7bdURaMFFlKigR11fSvfr2rj/view?usp=sharing

Academic Language, Videos

“Academic language is the glue that cements content and language learning” (Gottlieb, 2016).

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Academic language, often referred to as the “language of school” is something that has to be explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced on a regular basis in order for our students to be able to succeed in today’s classroom and leave high school college and career ready. But did you know that academic language is far more complex than simply teaching the vocabulary that students need to know in order to be successful? It involves three dimensions-discourse, sentence, and word/phrase-all of which vary based upon the topic, genre, and task.

WIDA has put together a helpful chart that explains the features of academic language for all three of the above mentioned dimensions.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B–qL9HKiMANf0Uzhtdl9JiEQF_reKoi/view?usp=sharing
For a PDF of the chart, click the link above.
This video shows examples of building academic language in the classroom and has helpful tips on how to use sentence frames and starters to help students speak and write about what they are learning.