What is academic language?
Academic language is the language that is used during instruction, in course materials, and on formative and summative assessments. Academic language includes both general academic (tier 2) and content-specific (tier 3) words within a science discipline. It is how students develop and express content understanding.
It is the language students need to learn in order to participate in meaningful content-rich discussions. Academic language usually falls into the category of tier 2 (high frequency with multiple meanings) and tier 3 words (context-specific words). They allow students to describe scientific concepts in detail.
Why is academic language important?
By using academic language, students are repeatedly exposed to both general academic and content-specific words within a discipline. Repeated exposure and use of such terms help students to be able to remember and retrieve information learned. Success in a science classroom relies on a student’s ability to understand and use new vocabulary words.
To help you, we have come up with the 48 highly used tier 2 (sprinkled with some tier 3) academic words in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Crosscutting Concepts, and the Common Core. The goal is to consistently use these words in the classroom. This can be done by direct instruction, during small group instruction, modeling, team discussions, written responses, and on formative or summative assessments. Using academic language will help build confidence in your students when they see these words within informative texts, videos, or assessments. You can read more about the use of academic language as a test-prep strategy here.
Academic language teaching strategies
Vocabulary games in the classroom are a fun way to incorporate retrieval practice. Here are 7 strategies and games you can use today:
- Teach one word at a time. State the word and describe it. Then, in teams, have students restate the focus word in their own words. Encourage them to make personal connections to the word.
- Show students a picture of the word, and have them draw it. When you couple illustrations with academic language, it greatly increases word recall. You can read more about that here.
- Using sentence starters, have students use the words in their team discussions. Here is a collection of sentence starters you can use today. Laminate these cards and keep them at student tables for quick access. They are a great way to help students to be fantastic in front of their peers when it comes to team discussions.
- Interactive word wall: have word walls organized by unit or theme. The wall can contain both visual representations of the words or real objects.
- List, Group & Label: Students are given a list of words. Then, as a team, they will group them with like words and finally assign a label to each group of words.
- After introducing vocabulary words, give students a chance to independently apply their new knowledge. For example, give them a short informational text where the focus words are used. Then have students discuss in teams what they have learned. This can be scaffolded by using sentence starters. For example, “The evidence I have studied/researched says ____” or “A convincing reason this would be _____ is because of ____ and ____.”
- Give students the opportunity to write about the informational text using the focus words. This is as simple as an exit ticket, a reflection in their interactive notebook or bell work.
- Download the FREE Guide of Online Resources for Teaching Science. Here you will find several different platforms you can use for students to practice their vocabulary.
In Summary…
In summary, academic language is used in formal instruction, instructional material, and formative and summative assessments. It includes both tier 2 (high frequency) words and tier 3 (specific to the content area) words. Success in a science classroom relies on repeated exposure to academic language. This exposure helps students to recall information and assists them in deciphering what is being asked of them on assessments. We also discussed 8 different ways to teach academic language in the classroom.
For those wanting a little more, check out these articles:
Download the FREE Guide of Online Resources for Teaching Science. Here you will find several platforms you can use to help students practice their academic language.
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