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 tools’ 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.
The goal of this experimental intervention study was to determine if evidence-based instructional strategies for general vocabulary words are effective with middle school English learner (EL) students and academic vocabulary words. Participants showed significantly more growth in their knowledge of academic vocabulary during the treatment condition than during the control condition. A secondary goal of this study was to examine the predictive utility of students' English language proficiency, and students' general vocabulary knowledge in English was a positive predictor for their academic vocabulary growth during the intervention. However, participants' growth during the control period had the greatest predictive utility for their growth during the intervention. Furthermore, this relationship was negative, suggesting that the intervention had the greatest benefits for students who made the least progress in English vocabulary in the absence of the intervention. Implications for instruction, policy, and future research are presented.
Reading engagement has been found to be a predictor of reading comprehension and reading achievement in English monolingual students across the elementary grades. However, researchers have not yet explored this relationship with English language learners (ELLs). The purpose of this study was to understand the role of ELLs' reading engagement in both their general and content-specific reading comprehension. We used the construct of reading engagement to determine whether engagement mediated the relationship between ELLs' English language proficiency and general reading comprehension and the relationship between content-specific (science) academic vocabulary and content area (science) reading comprehension. For both 5th-grade Asian ELLs and 6th-grade Hispanic ELLs, reading engagement mediated the relationship between English language proficiency and general comprehension and the relationship between science vocabulary and science comprehension. Taken together, these findings suggest that reading engagement functions as an explanatory mechanism between language proficiency and comprehension in early adolescent ELLs. We discuss the implications of these findings for reading engagement in late elementary and middle school.
In the DCAAL project, a group of master teachers and university researchers found that there are many opportunities within content area lessons for supporting students' academic language development.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.