Building Academic Vocabulary In After-school Settings

By Author: Amandda
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On a hot, sunny afternoon in southern California, 20 middle school English-language learners (ELLs) were moving through a timed gallery walk with student-designed pictures posted on the walls of a classroom. The students were taking part in an after-school program called Language Workshop, and the gallery pictures illustrated words like process, function, consistent, and benefit. Students had created the pictures for these words in teams. The teams then made their way around the room, trying to guess which words other teams had illustrated, and they could only spend two minutes at each picture. For those familiar with speed dating, we called this "speed gallery walking," and, despite the gorgeous weather and the voluntary nature of this after-school program, students were engaged in learning academic vocabulary words. The goal of the Language Workshop program was to improve ELLs' academic vocabulary as one way of increasing their access to textbooks and Vibram Five Fingers other instructional materials. Language Workshop achieved this goal, and my purpose in this article is to ...
... share the engaging games and activities that contributed to the program's success, as well as the theoretical and empirical rationale behind them.

Language Workshop was the intervention at the center of a study designed to determine if vocabulary instruction strategies shown to be effective with elementary students learning general vocabulary words would also be effective in a new context. Specifically, the context for this study involved (a) general academic vocabulary words, which are used across content areas, have abstract definitions, and are challenging to master, and (b) middle school English-language learners. To design a successful intervention, we (the author and teaching assistants) had to answer three questions from the existing literature: (1) what is academic vocabulary, and why is it important? (2) What instructional strategies for vocabulary are supported by empirical research? How can we engage adolescent ELLs in learning academic vocabulary words? Because of the difficulty experienced by ELLs in attaining academic English proficiency, Hakuta, Butler, and Witt (2000) recommended extra instructional time in after-school and other settings to accelerate academic English development. Thus, the three design questions were all considered in the context of a voluntary after-school program.

The literature on academic English in the K—12 setting has dramatically expanded in the last few years( Hakuta et al., 2000; Scarcella, 2003; Schleppegrell, 004), particularly as it has been shown to be a barer for ELLs as they work to access the curriculum, academic vocabulary words are one element of academic English, "a variety or a register of English used in professional books and characterized by specific linguistic features associated with academic disciplines" karcella, 2003, p. 19). Schleppegrell (2004) explained lat as students move through the years of schooling, the literacy demands of their academic work increase. LS Corson (1997) stated, academic language is primarily accessed through texts, not conversation, and some children are well-positioned to gain access to this language and others are not. Because many academic words have Greek and Latin roots, they have lost their semantic transparency. For example, the word interpretation does not reveal much of its meaning through its root or affixes. Thus, explained Corson, for students who "do not have opportunities outside the classroom to use academic words in motivated ways (and few people do)...their learning of these words becomes a hit-and-miss affair" (p. 688).

The target words for Language Workshop were the 60 most common academic words according to Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL); see Table 1 for a list of these words. The AWL comprises general academic words as opposed to discipline-specific words. Thus, the words are used across disciplines, and typically they are not targeted for instruction to the same degree as Cheap Vibram Fivefingers essential content-specific words. However, as Hyland and Tse (2007) concluded, general academic words have specific meanings in different contexts; understanding the meaning of the word structure in respect to the structure of a cell does not guarantee understanding of the structure of a poem. In designing Language Workshop, we considered these challenges of academic vocabulary words along with evidence-based practices for vocabulary development and recommendations for effective adolescent literacy programs.