Academic Vocabulary: What our Students Need to Know

As we are evaluating resources for exemplary close read texts, we are seeing an increased demand on students to be able to read at a higher level than they typically may be accustomed to. Through professional development we have been provided with throughout the school year as well as specific training in common core, we are working towards understanding academic vocabulary more, how it helps with the success of our students, and interventions to help students with the rigorous texts they are being faced with.


As a group, we read through "Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition" by William Nagy (Seattle Pacific University) and Dianna Townsend (University of Nevada, Reno). The abstract states:

There is a growing awareness of the importance of academic vocabulary, and more generally, of academic language proficiency, for students' success in school. There is also a growing body of research on the nature of the demands that academic language places on readers and writers, and on interventions to help students meet these demands. In this review, we discuss the role of academic vocabulary within academic language, examine recent research on
instruction in academic vocabulary, considering both general academic words and discipline-specific words, and offer our perspective on the current state of this research and recommendations on how to continue inquiry and to improve practice in this area. We use the metaphor of 'words as tool s' to reflect our understanding that instruction in
Academic vocabulary must approach words as means for communicating and thinking about disciplinary content, and must therefore provide students with opportunities to use the instructed words for these purposes as they are learning them.

Clearly, as educators, before we can introduce our students to great texts to dissect and understand, we have to make sure they have the confidence to handle the language they are, and will be, exposed to. The article is extremely helpful in guiding teachers to help students understand the characteristics of academic language, interventions to help students struggling with difficult texts, and what we're continuing to learn in the field of education in regards to language acquisition in our students.

The following table has helped us to critically review texts for appropriate close read materials and ensure we are preparing our students to be able to read, analyze, and communicate about them:

Domains of Academic Language and Guiding Questions for Teachers

Language Domain Questions to Drive Instruction
Interpersonal Stance Does the way this is written tell us anything about the
author or what they believe? Why or why not?

Information Load How many pieces or chunks of information are in
this sentence?
Why is there so much information packed into this?

Organization of Information What clues, words, and pieces of information did the
author give us so we can follow where this
paragraph is going?
Are there some clues/words that tell us about
relationships?
Are smaller ideas part of bigger ones?

Lexical Choices Do we see phrases we don't often use when we
speak?
Why are they here? Are there many different words
in the passage? Why do you think that is necessary?
What do the challenging words tell us that the easier
words may not?

Representational Congruence Do you see any words that represent a process or
something happening? Why would the author use
one word and not explain the whole process?

*Taken from: Reading Research Quarterly. 47, pp. 91-108. International Reading Association