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.

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.

Could you be more specific?

One of the most surefire ways to create vivid writing is to be highly specific. Don't say loud to describe a sound that is actually piercing or blaring. Don't say slow when what you mean is sluggish or creeping.

Finding just the right word when you need it can be a challenge for anyone, but for students who speak a language other than English at home, the pool of descriptive words from which to draw may not be nearly as deep as it could be. That's why it's so essential to provide enriching vocabulary in the classroom -- which actually benefits all students.

I recently ordered a set of word wall posters from the Teach Me Writing curriculum. (While my preference is to find free online resources whenever possible, I gladly paid for these and found them well worth the money.) The posters -- 43 in all -- offer alternatives to commonly used words of all kinds, including general verbs, adjectives that describe emotions, and so-called "over-used words." In all, they offer 263 enriching vocabulary words that can be posted in class.

Among the vivid verbs to replace look, move and take were glance, trudge and snatch. To describe precisely how things sound, look, smell, taste and touch, we have words like rustle, hazy, reek, tangy and crisp. I'm planning to rotate the posters on a word wall and have students copy the words in their binders to create personal dictionaries. These can later be used when they're stumped for just the right word in just the right spot.

Of course, you don't need posters to help expand your students' vocabulary. Try this lesson from About.com's ESL page. Create a worksheet with two columns. In the first, write a list of about 10 basic words such as walk, move, hold and drink. In the second, write a longer list that includes more specific words such as stagger, writhe, clutch and gulp. Have students match all of the specific words from the second column to the general ones listed in column one. I'm planning to use this with the help of a thesaurus.