Quote: "In our view, academic language can be best identified by describing the language functions and the level of the thinking skills needed to engage in specific content activities. Thus discrete language elements such as vocabulary, grammatical structures, spelling and pronunciation are integrated into the language functions used in the content activity, not taught as separate functions of content subjects." (41) This piece stood out for me for a few reasons. First off, because I see so much success with this in my classroom amongst some of my higher readers-- they are so much more willing to try out new vocabulary that they have picked up from a book. I have been reading Alice in Wonderland to them lately, for instance, and it has been awesome to see them using some of the more obscure words that we have pulled out as our vocab from the book, as well as some of the words that we did not specifically define but that I think they pulled from context. On the other hand, I think my lower readers are often disserved by the lack of grammatical sophistication in what they are reading. This is something I had touched on when our reading consultant came for professional development lately-- that they do not get the "fun", quality literature from which vocab can really explode. This is something that I am trying to make more of a priority in my classroom.
Question:
In a classroom with a wide range of ELLs, what is worthwhile to target in terms of vocabulary? I am pretty decent about pulling this out when I'm creating UbD units, but really poor about integrating academic vocab otherwise. Resources of what academic vocab a first grader should have by the end of the year? Most useful?
Comment: I think I got a lot out of reading this chapter. I really had not put that much thought into academic language versus social language, and in recent CFUs since beginning this unit, I've found that vocabulary is way more of an issue than I had previously realized.
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Kate since you and I share the same students, I agree with you about how the higher level students find it easier and are more comfortable with using the academic language they are exposed to than my lower math students. However, I am pushing and making a point to constantly use those words (math vocabulary and other academic math words) every single chance I get because sooner or later after repeated exposure, they will eventually feel safe enough to take a risk and use them too. I have been impressed repeatedly by our Spartan A who is definately not shy asking me during a regular casual conversation to explain what a word means. I have some Highlanders who more and more are also feeling safe enough and curious enough to ask me what certain words that I use mean. Some of these words are not math words necessarily but just other words that they are not familiar with. What has been useful for me when explaining what certain words mean has been to use examples of synonyms. They really understand the concept because you have taught them so well and it definately carries over inot my math instruction or other informal conversations that I have with our students. I just wanted to share that will you that I think our students have much more interest in language than I think we sometimes realize. It is exciting to me to see the interest and the risk that they are taking to attempt to use the words that they hear us use!
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