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.

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.

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.

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.

It was the way you said it

In an effort to make their word choice more specific and their writing more vivid, students in my class have come up with a list of alternatives to the word "said."

mumbled
whispered
blurted out
blubbered
ranted
gasped
groaned
grumbled
protested
complained
recounted
asserted
remarked
uttered
mouthed
pronounced
yelled
announced

Homework is to list 20 alternatives to the word "nice."