My boss passed to me an article from District Administration’s February 2008 issue on vocabulary, Narrow the Academic Language Gap to Reduce the Achievement Gap:  You must teach academic vocabulary if you expect your students to use it. by Eamonn O’Donovan.  O’Donovan focuses on an eighth-grade language arts teacher and her class in California.  He describes how she directly teaches words that are necessary for standardized tests and for the reading of textbooks.  The students have to use the words in their writing and in their classroom activities.  O’Donovan cites the National Reading Panel’s recommendations for direct vocabulary instruction in 2000. 

Academic language is the focus of the ACCESS for ELL test for English Language Learners that is required yearly in New Jersey.  English language learners are tested in the academic language of Math, Reading, Science and Social Studies as well as Social and Interactive language.  One of my areas of duty used to include ESL so I am very familiar with this test. 

I like the idea of testing academic language.  As a classroom teacher, I would get students who had passed the social and interactive language test, but would sit mute in the classroom because their knowledge of academic language was not up to the level necessary for the classroom instruction.  Through a trial-and-error method, I learned that I needed to spend time on terms such as composition, essay, open-ended response, prompt, plot summary  and the myriad of other literary terms that most students had acquired from years of being in the same school system.  Also, when choosing vocabulary words from literature, a second list was usually made for the words that we took for granted that students knew and of course for idioms.  One memorable time was when reading My Antonia in a ninth grade English class.  A student from Brazil asked me for the meaning of cocky.  I explained it with a dictionary-type definition.  She still did not understand.  So, I had to demonstrate how a person who would be called cocky might swagger into a room or present himself in a classroom.  Once she could see the actions, then she could identify the word in Portuguese and the word had meaning for her.  How many other words did I miss teaching these students because they did not feel comfortable enough to ask?

O’Donovan’s point is that all students, not just ESL students, need to be taught academic language to succeed.  Academic language is the code that sometimes excludes students from getting the educational opportunities that would be most beneficial to them.   All students need to be taught the academic language of the individual disciplines because this is the language of that particular discourse community.  Thus, all disciplines need to teach vocabulary, not just English in high school or language arts in middle school.  And the students need to learn not just key terms but the language of the directions, the language of the writing assignments for that discipline, the language of the articles and textbooks for the discipline.  And, my pet peeve, the students need to use the academic language in their discussions and in their writing.  The more familiar the students are with producing academic language independently, the more the language will stay with them.