With a better
understanding of what Academic Language is and why it is important to develop
(see September and October issues), the next step is to examine how we can
foster environments where academic language can be developed. As a brief
reminder, academic language is more than just the words we use to talk in classes.
They also include the way we formulate our ideas and even how we formulate
them.
Modeling
Modeling academic language is an important starting point. Teachers who
demonstrate how to state and express their thoughts in academic language, in addition
to showing students how to decode and interpret that language is important.
However, merely using academic language is not enough. Simply using
the jargon and language of your content field without pointing it out or
showing how you use it, may only frustrate the problem. Instead, Modeling
it might mean using the language, but then having those keywords or phrases
posted on the board so that students can feel more comfortable lifting that
language as well. I remember how important this was for me in statistics
class, where the wording of how I expressed my findings mattered a great deal.
I specifically remember writing down the sentence template that I would
need to use to state the confidence levels of a given study.
Think Alouds
Think alouds can also be very beneficial. Basically, a teacher will take
a piece of academic text, and read it aloud to class as he or she would if they
read it on their own as a specialist in the field. This would involve
reading a sentence or two of the text, and then stopping to make an
observation, to question, or to elaborate on something. Note, that a
think aloud doesn’t mean that you tell people exactly what the text means
line-by-line. The purpose is to make visible the invisible workings of a
specialist reading a text. Show them your thinking.
Gestures and Hand Movements
Sometimes, we can help grow the academic language of students by focusing on
specific words that are valuable to academic talk. In this case, you
would identify these words and then show how they are used. But as an
additional way for students to conceptualize the word or phrase, use hand
gestures to bring it to life.
“I understand your argument
about (gesture to the left with your right hand). . . . However, (gesture to
the right with your left hand) I think you might also consider. . .”
On the back of this newsletter is a chart of potential academic words /
phrases you can use along with potential hand gestures that will enable your
students to experience these words in more tangible ways. The chart was
produced by Jeffrey Zwier in his book Building Academic Language.
Read the full newsletter here.
