Developing Academic Language with Familiar Content

I love working with students using complex academic language.  It is so fun seeing light bulbs go off as I watch students construct new sentences using high level vocabulary and concepts. Of course, in order to create complex sentences with complex vocabulary, we first need to create complex sentences with familiar concepts and vocabulary.  Start with easy concepts and vocabulary that go in complex sentences, then up the ante and give students academic vocabulary to use in their now familiar complex sentences.

The main comprehension skills that come up over and over again in our standards:

• Compare and Contrast
• Cause and Effect
• Sequence of Events
• Main Idea & Details

Although there are more strategies and skills that we teach students, these four are foundational to academic learning.  If students can master speaking and writing about literature or nonfiction text within the context of these skills, they will have a good grasp of academic speaking and writing.

Now, before we can expect students to be able to apply these skills to academic tasks, it is helpful to give students the academic language needed for the skill using an easier context.  Having a familiar topic helps students concentrate on the language needed for the skill instead of the content.

The example below come from an  Earth Science unit.  The unit includes a ton of opportunities to practice academic language.  With every section, students use the complex sentences with familiar content before applying the new sentences to new content.

However, you can develop academic language with familiar content using your own classroom materials.  The process is still the same.  It’s a basic structure of explicit teaching with multiple opportunities to practice.  This is simply one way I have taught and practiced academic language using familiar concepts.

Learn the Sentences with Familiar Content

In this particular example, students were comparing and contrasting slow and fast actions.  Eventually their task was to compare and contrast slow and fast changes to our Earth.  However, to start, we used everyday actions that I knew would be familiar to students.

Sort the Actions

First, we sorted the actions by those that occur slowly and those that occur quickly.  Students already understood the concepts of slowly and quickly and were familiar with all the actions.  It was a quick and easy sort.  That’s good because my focus was giving students practice with the complex sentences.

Fill in the Sentence Frames

After sorting the sentences, I introduced the first sentence frame.  We practiced filling in the blanks with the actions and either quickly or slowly.  The whole class chorally said the sentence after each example.  I did a few examples and then introduced the second sentence frame.

After a few examples, I had student volunteers come up and build sentences.

After the volunteer built the sentence, the whole class practiced the sentence.

Practice with a Partner

To get in as much practice as possible, I handed out small strips of paper that had the sentence frame on it with all the possible combinations.  This is called a sentence construction chart.  There are four different versions, since you can say either the quick or the slow action first.  Students practiced saying the sentence with various partners.

After each partner group was finished, they switched sentences, so that students practiced saying different variations of the compare and contrast sentences.

Individual Practice

Once I felt that students were familiar enough with the concepts and sentence frames, we went back to our seats and completed an individual activity where students sorted the actions and attached “linking” words in the correct spaces.  This acts as another version of the sentence construction chart.

Follow-up Partner Practice

As students finished up, I had them partner up and practice constructing a variety of sentences.  Not all students got to this step, since students finished their activity at varying times.  But, now that students have completed worksheets, we can use them tomorrow as a quick practice!

Language is one of my favorite things to teach!  However, it is also one of the  most difficult subjects to plan.  There’s a ton of mental work that I need to do to plan the vocabulary, the concept development, the sentence frames, let along the actual student practice activities!

Our school is now doing Integrated ELD (English Language Development).  We’re supposed to be planning and teaching lessons like this daily.  Unfortunately that doesn’t happen.  The kids need it so much!  But, it’s really hard to do effectively.

What are your experiences with planning and teaching language to students?  Do you have to teach ELD or some sort of language objective with your lessons?  I’ve only experiences schools in California, so I’m curious how other states work with their English learners, especially if you have a large population of them.

Find out more about the Earth Science Unit.

Find out how to Teach and Practice Cause and Effect using this Earth Science Unit.