Critical Vocabulary: Academic Language

This year has been a wonderful learning experience to integrate vocabulary in many ways. In our kindergarten class we maintain vocabulary learning in many routines (new daily American Sign Language, a word family each week, two sight words each week to add to our sight word wall, and a content word wall). It is amazing to me how quickly the children absorb larger words and have a hunger to learn and repeat these new vocabulary words in the fitting context.

For me this year, I am seeking to be versed well in academic language in order to provide the best language instruction. As research demonstrates, it is vital to provide proper language instruction and intervention if students have gaps in their vocabulary knowledge. This year we have been assessing student vocabulary knowledge since the beginning of the year. We have seen tremendous growth for some students and then for others we are continually working intentionally to provide effective intervention. Specifically for our lowest academic group, works with our ESL teacher and our amazing AE doing phonic/phonemic awareness intervention. For our middle group, we facilitate Peer Assisted Learning strategy (Link to research: PALS).

Interesting, I've found that vocabulary instruction is not simply teaching the word and its context, but it is an active process that is critical for students to learn academic language. Below are some ways that I've been practicing teaching vocabulary which have been very helpful.

To better understand academic language, I'll give a classroom example: I often teach Number Talks which rely on student discussion to elicit higher order and student thinking about a math problem. This uses visual thinking strategy and is a fun way to engage kids in academic language. Below is a number talk prompt asking: How many fish are there in our school. This was exciting for the kids because we just got fish for our classroom (related to Foss science lessons)!

The Central Focus for this lesson was for students to listen to the poem (clue of askew--which I demonstrated, defined and repeated), see the poster, subitize (tell number of objects quickly without counting), and describe their thinking strategy. In the end I want my students to be able to describe their mathematical thinking. 

The Language Function is to  subitize (a math word we've taught to the Kindergarteners--here's a great video!) and describe their problem-solving procedure. The Language Demand is to define and represent their thinking of this problem in order to determine a solution. The Language Function requires students to share their strategy with others, therefore the Form I focused on was the structure: I see ____ because I ... Several students then "taught" the class their strategy. 

The lesson was quite a success because it was engaging and students had both the freedom to share their ideas without correction, AND they are confident given the structure and scaffolded support. What I know and have seen this year, is that when students engage consistently with fun ways of learning new words, they are vastly more ready to consider themselves readers--and that's my big goal!