Academic Language: More than Just Vocabulary?

Two TESOL presentations got me thinking about what constitutes "academic language" at the K-12 level. What typically comes to mind when I hear this phrase is vocabulary: content-specific words such as plateau and condensation, as well as general academic words like source, process and analyze. But in a presentation called "Scaffolding Academic Language for ELLs at Every Proficiency Level," Christina Celic, a former teacher and author of English Language Learners Day By Day K-6, pointed out that vocabulary is just one part of the equation. Because academic language relies on so many sentence structures that aren't familiar to English language learners (even advanced ELLs), we must also be sure to explicitly break down some of its key elements:

* Academic language is typically written in the passive voice (e.g.,water vapor is released from plants during transpiration).
* It includes many signal words (e.g., likewise, moreover, in spite of).
* It contains nominal phrases (higher, cooler parts of the atmosphere).
* It uses multiple clauses.

In a separate presentation, "Oral Language Development in the Grade-level Content Classroom," Mary Lou McCloskey and Linda New Levine outlined specific challenges in teaching the academic language of science. The following excerpt offers some good examples and is taken from a handout available here:

Specific grammatical structures include:
* passive voice: is shown, was found, has been explained, etc.
* modals: possibly, could, might be, would, etc.
* embedded clauses: The latest research, developed from laboratories on three continents, indicates that…
* complex sentences: A growing number of research studies suggests, however, that such an increase in temperature could have a large impact on life, especially in coastal regions of North America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Science text organizational structures:
*steps of a process: Following evaporation, water vapor cools and falls to the Earth as rain or snow.
*cause and effect: As a result of auto emissions, nitric oxide and sulfur dioxide combine with water in the air.
* main idea and details: The biomes in this area consist of grasslands, scrublands, deserts, and deciduous forests.

Developing Internal Templates

One of the presentations I attended at last month's TESOL Convention made me think about the types of support materials I provide my students -- and how often I expect them to "just know" things.

"Teaching Writing in a Multilevel Mainstream Classroom," led by three teachers and a professor of teacher education, took us through an eight-week unit on writing fictional narratives with students in grade four. But the lesson had a twist. Before writing the stories, each student had to research a particular animal from a scientific point of view, describing, among other things, its behaviors and habitat. Once they had that part down and had moved on to the fictional piece, those behaviors had to be reflected in the character development. The habitat became the setting.

Let me first say how impressed I was that these teachers had been able to devote eight weeks (eight weeks!) to this lesson; I know that effective writing instruction is surprisingly time-consuming. But what stood out for me most was the range of support materials they had provided for their students. Among them:

* a graphic organizer for the research component
* a separate graphic organizer for story development
* a list of possible character traits using enriched vocabulary
* a chart to back up each proposed character trait with evidence in the form of behaviors (my personal favorite)
* a list of transitional phrases to help with order and pacing

It's easy to forget that many students don't carry these structures or techniques around in their heads already, and to simply instruct them to go ahead and write. This workshop helped me to keep in mind that even the most basic writing assignments are really not so basic. They require a pretty wide range of tools if they are to help students develop their own internal templates, which is really the ultimate goal.

Generation 1.5

The first workshop I attended at the TESOL Convention, "Supporting Your Non-ESL Colleagues Who Teach ESL Students," considered some of the characteristics of Generation 1.5. As its name suggests, this group is made up of students who fall somewhere (culturally and linguistically) between first-generation immigrants and second-generation children born in the States. Most of the time they are found in mainstream classrooms in public schools. While the U.S. may be the only place that members of Generation 1.5 have ever called home, they are raised in linguistic enclave communities.

The notion that the term "English language learner" can mean many different things, and reflect a broad range of very specific needs, is pretty basic. But in my view, this isn't always obvious, and it isn't always recognized.

Consider the student who comes to the U.S. at age 10, who is literate in her native language and has already received some English instruction in an academic setting. The challenges she faces will differ from those of a native-born child who has no accent but is encountering academic vocabulary and language for the first time at school--and who will likely never achieve full proficiency in his native tongue.

Because of this, the workshop presenters stressed that true proficiency cannot be measured by how fluent students sound or by how long they have been in the country. To understand what ELLs really need, we must first consider where and how they are encountering the type of language that is required for school.

The text below is from this handout provided at the training:

Several linguistic and socioeconomic factors make the acquisition processes of Generation 1.5 different from that of typical English learners:

1. They acquire much of their English through informal oral/aural interaction with friends, classmates, and co-workers (very often community dialect speakers) through interaction with English-dominant siblings and members of the extended family, and of course passive input from radio and TV.

2. As oral/aural dominant they may not notice nonsalient grammatical features, and thus these features never become part of their language repertoire. (They may use incorrect verb forms, word forms, confuse count/non count nouns, plurals, articles, prepositions, etc. Example: don't see the difference between "confident" vs "confidence")

3. In their speech they rely heavily on context and other pragmatic features of discourse rather than syntactic and morphological specificity. (Use body language, intonation, facial expression etc. to make themselves understood. Communicating in writing may be frustrating because lack these cues. Proofreading is difficult--may not be able to "hear" mistakes.)

4. They become highly proficient communicators, but face difficulty when confronted with academic writing tasks that demand a high level of grammatical accuracy.

5. Oral/aural learners generally lack the "meta-language" and grammatical terminology necessary for understanding explanations of their grammar errors. (So when teachers talk about progressive verbs or gerunds, for example, student may look blank.)

Greetings from TESOL

If you're familiar with Teachers of English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL), a global association for English language teachers, you probably know that TESOL's annual convention has come to Boston. Each year, the convention attracts about 8,000 people from around the world and offers amazing professional development opportunities.

I'm so grateful to be attending this time around and have a full week of courses lined up. The convention itself runs from Wednesday-Saturday, but pre-convention classes run all day on Tuesday as well. Beginning next week, I'll be posting summaries and highlights from the workshops I'm attending, so stay tuned.

Getting organized

As part of our study of the Six Traits of Writing, my students and I have been working on organization. This trait, which focuses on the structure of writing, is actually made up of several smaller sub-skills:

* Writing strong introductions, hooks, and leads
* Balancing creativity with formula
* Pacing & sequencing
* Use of thoughtful, interesting transitions
* Writing satisfying conclusions
* Creating strong & satisfying titles

As always, The Writing Fix has some great online resources. If you're looking for a strong intro sentence, try this prompt generator. At the click of a button, the site generates lines like these:

* He tried to remember who had talked him into this.
* I cared what she thought, so when she dared me I knew I was in trouble.
* She had been warned, but now it was too late.

To teach this trait, I've mostly been sticking with Vicki Spandel's series on the Six Traits, but I've also found this list of transitional words and phrases quite helpful.

Know What I Mean?

Since good writing involves the use of specific language, I want my students to have a rich vocabulary of precise words. But as those of us who work with advanced ELLs know, it can be difficult to determine how much a student actually understands.

I recently came across a site with a great description of what it really means to know the meaning of a word. The text below is excerpted from Vocabulary Ideas Compiled by Deb Smith:

What does it mean to know a word?

Stage 1: Never saw it before.
Stage 2: Heard it, but doesn’t know what it means.
Stage 3: Recognizes it in context as having something to do with _____.
Stage 4: Knows it well.

[A]n individual’s knowledge about a word can also be described as falling along a continuum. We suggested the following points on such a continuum.

• No Knowledge
• General sense, such as knowing mendacious has a negative connotation
• Narrow, context-bound, such as knowing that a radiant bride is a beautifully smiling bride, but unable to describe an individual in a different context as radiant.
• Having knowledge of a word but not being able to recall it readily enough to use it in appropriate situations.
• Rich, decontextualized knowledge of a word’s meaning, its relationship to other words, and its extension to metaphorical uses, such as understanding what someone is doing when they are devouring a book.

Cronbach wrote in 1942:

• Generalization: The ability to define a word.
• Application: The ability to select or recognize situation appropriate to a word.
• Breadth: Knowledge of multiple meanings.
• Precision: The ability to apply a term correctly to all situations and to recognize inappropriate use.
• Availability: The actual use of a word in thinking and discourse.

What it means to know a word is clearly a complicated multifaceted matter, and one that has serious implications for how words are taught and how word knowledge is measured.

Blogging in the Classroom

My students and I have recently launched a separate blog for student writing, which will enable them to make comments on each other's work.

For teachers who want to learn more about classroom blogging, the National Writing Project has a post called Digital Toolbox: Blogs. Included is a brief YouTube video explaining how blogs can be used in different settings. Here's another version of the same video, called Blogs in Plain English, that includes subtitles in Spanish.

So what are the benefits of using a blog in school? For one, it's a great way to publish student work, and knowing that a broader audience will see their writing can be very motivating. My students' parents will proudly send links of their children's work to friends and family around the world, from New York to Moscow to Tel Aviv.

It also gives students a chance to read comments from peers, teachers, family and friends. Understanding what stands out to their readers can be encouraging and help students figure out how to improve their work. I have also appointed two co-editors for the blog. This is a position that needs to be earned through consistent hard work, but all students will eventually get a chance to take this on. Yet another incentive!

Listening to Blogging in the Classroom on WFCR radio in Amherst, Mass., I heard several teachers discussing how technology had helped their students. They said having a blog motivated kids to produce higher quality work and enabled them to connect with students from other schools. Blogging was also seen as a great way to create a positive writing community.

Full of ideas

My students and I recently made it through the brainstorming stage, and I must say, facilitating this part of the process has not always been easy for me. When it comes to my own writing, I run through this stage automatically, barely aware that I'm doing it. At one point, my mind seems a bit like the blackboard in the photo to the left: I have a million ideas, but there's no sense of how they might work together. Some of the ideas will be kept, but most will not. Still, there's an energy to the process that keeps my mind moving, generating ideas until I hit upon the ones that will eventually stand out for me as the ones.

But just because I know how to do this with my own thoughts, does it necessarily mean that I know how to bring order to the thoughts in my students' heads? Or that I can always spark the energy and sense of urgency that get the ideas flowing in the first place?

I'm going to have to say no -- but as it turns out, that's OK, because there's a slew of (perfectly free!) material out there that's been helping me to accomplish it anyway.

As part of our work on the Six Traits of Writing, we are focusing on idea development, which involves recalling and recording memorable details. This graphic organizer on the five senses helped students to focus on what they observe in everyday situations. To make the activity more specific, I asked them to list what they would see, hear, taste, smell and touch at the following locations: a bakery, a beach, an amusement park, and a playground. Then we worked to come up with language that was more precise and descriptive, and students recorded the words they planned to use. For example, at a bakery we said we would smell aromas wafting through the air; at a beach we would feel the grittiness of the sand in our shoes; and at an amusement park we might hear the whine of the machinery as a ride got off the ground.

I also love these idea development post-it notes, which say things like, "I used a balance of showing and telling," and "My details try to paint a picture in the reader’s head." I affixed a checklist on each child's paper. For first drafts, they used these idea development worksheets , which also feature a checklist at the end.

I would also like to try the describing wheel , which seems like it would be great for taking a single detail and coming up with many interesting ways to describe it. To identify the audience and refine purpose, I like this planning chart. The inverted triangle is good for narrowing down a topic.

Idea development: getting started

The first of the Six Traits of Writing that I'll be tackling with my students is idea development, which can actually be broken down into a number of sub-skills:

* using strong and memorable details
* balancing showing and telling
* writing about unique topics
* developing an original idea within a safe frame
* exploring themes and theses, big topics and sub-topics
* self-reflecting to write about what you know

It's amazing what resources teachers are willing to share online. I'm currently smitten with WritingFix, which has an entire section on idea development. On the same site, I also found the following song, attributed to "Mrs. Stelle." Thanks, Mrs. Stelle!

Ideas
To the tune: She’ll be Comin’ Around the Mountain
by Mrs. Stelle

Can you tell me what makes up a good idea?
Can you tell me what defines a good idea?
A single topic, clear and focused,
with fresh insights that provoke us,
anecdotes “though not required”
can cinch the deal.

If your story is a bore or moves too slow,
if it wanders off the topic it’s a “NO”,
you must answer readers’ questions
using details and suggestions
all while telling us what
we don’t already know.

If you want for your ideas to score a four,
then you’ll have to spin a yarn that gives us more,
than just a list of things you did once
that impressed the other kids once--
we’ve all read a thousand papers
before yours!

Just the Right Wordle

If you like the image above -- essentially a colorful arrangement of the most frequently used words on this blog -- you can thank Wordle for that. Wordle is a Web-based tool that generates a design from a group of words. You can either type in text of your own or have the tool pull from a particular Web site. The words will vary in size and color; the ones used most frequently in the original text will appear as the largest in the resulting image. These "word clouds" can then be saved using screen capture software.

While it isn't hard to see what makes Wordle fun, I can't say I immediately appreciated how useful it could be in the classroom. A quick search on the Web turned up a number of great ideas, though. My favorite resource so far is a slideshow posted by Jennifer Wagner. In it, she suggests using Wordle to summarize political speeches, reinforce class rules, create unique reports, and correctly display words that are frequently misspelled.

Rodd Lucier of The Clever Sheep shares his top 20 uses, which include converting student essays into posters and creating visual introductions to new themes or chapters. I don't know which to try first.