Academic Language and English language learners

Summary

The webcast explains why English learners need explicit instruction in academic language, not only the conversational English they may use with friends or on the playground. Academic language is the language of schooling and texts, including the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and ways of organizing ideas needed to understand lessons, participate in discussions, and succeed in reading and writing.

Dr. Robin Scarcella illustrates the difference with the writing of her former student Vaughn. Although Vaughn had earned high grades and spoke English socially, her informal writing lacked many academic conventions. After a year in a three-course academic English sequence, her vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric improved substantially. The example underscores that academic language is teachable—and that communicating comfortably in everyday English does not necessarily prepare students for academic work.

Main Ideas

• Social and academic English differ. Everyday speech can rely on shared context, repetition, slang, imprecise grammar, and simpler vocabulary. Academic English more often requires precise word choice, grammatical accuracy, transitions, clear references between pronouns and nouns, and conventional expressions.
• Teach both kinds of language from the start. Students benefit from conversational skills, but teachers do not need to wait until informal English is mastered before building the foundations of academic language.
• Academic language includes oral as well as written skills. Students need support to participate in discussions and debates, explain ideas, and give presentations—not just to write essays.
• Instruction should be explicit, frequent, and scaffolded. Students need models, guided practice, repeated opportunities to use language, and constructive feedback. They should be expected to think and communicate at high levels, with adequate support and practice.
• Students’ language backgrounds matter. English learners who have developed academic language in their first language may acquire it in English more quickly.
• Instruction should be age- and proficiency-appropriate. Young children can build foundations through classroom talk, songs, games, movement, and familiar activities. Older students need increasingly sophisticated vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing, and discipline-specific language.
• Academic language develops continuously. It is not acquired in a fixed number of years or completed in an ESL/ELD class. Without continued exposure, practice, and instruction, students’ development may plateau.
• Responsibility is shared. ESL/ELD teachers, classroom teachers, content-area teachers, specialists, and administrators all have roles in ensuring students receive coherent support.

Instructional Methods and Recommendations

Compare Informal and Academic Passages

• Give students one informal passage and one academic passage.
• Have them compare the passages step by step, individually, with a partner, or in groups.
• Ask them to identify features such as repetition versus varied vocabulary, slang versus formal word choice, and sentences beginning with “and” or “but” versus transitions such as “however,” “moreover,” and “in addition.”
• Repeat the activity so students become familiar with the differences.

Teach Vocabulary Systematically—not as Definitions Alone

• Identify words that may block comprehension of a reading, including academic words and sometimes small but important words such as prepositions, adverbs, or conjunctions.
• Teach meaning, pronunciation, grammatical form, and how the word is used.
• Have students listen to and repeat the word, see it in a textbook sentence, hear it modeled in additional sentences, and then use it themselves.
• Provide a word bank, definitions, and model sentences; have students use the words with a partner to describe or explain something.
• Revisit words repeatedly and give feedback on accurate use.

Scaffold Oral Academic Language

• Teach useful vocabulary and grammatical structures before a presentation or discussion.
• Let students rehearse with a partner before speaking to the class.
• Provide sentence frames and complete expressions. For example, students might practice “We can stop poverty by …” before discussing solutions.
• Build from partner practice to a larger group discussion or presentation.

Use Close Reading

• Select a short passage and read it aloud so students hear the language and its rhythm.
• Explain the passage, then have students reread it with a specific focus.
• For example, students can underline pronouns and circle the nouns to which they refer, helping them understand who or what “he,” “she,” “it,” “we,” or “they” means.
• Examine synonyms, word families, collocations (words that commonly go together), and paragraph structure.

Use Summarization to Help Students Adopt Academic Language

• Model how to summarize a short passage.
• Have students summarize it orally to a partner, changing partners if useful.
• The activity gives students practice incorporating the author’s language into their own speech and can build fluency through repetition.

Make Writing Assignments Transparent and Supported

• Show students one or more samples of the expected work.
• Explain the assignment’s components and organization—for example, what a thesis statement does and where it should go.
• Provide relevant vocabulary, grammatical structures, and organizational or rhetorical guidance before students begin writing.
• Encourage students to use these supports; they are scaffolds, not cheating.
• Give constructive feedback so students can learn from errors rather than repeatedly reinforcing them.

Coordinate Feedback Across a School

• Use consistent feedback methods or symbols so students do not have to interpret a new system in each grade.
• Make feedback instructional rather than punitive.
• Help students gradually develop self-editing skills and awareness of their own strengths and areas for improvement.

Connect Language Objectives to Actual Classroom Tasks

Content and language objectives should be informed by the texts students read and the speaking and writing tasks they perform. A general alignment of content standards and language objectives is not enough if it ignores the specific language students need for a particular text or assignment.

Adapt Teaching to Students’ Ages and Needs

• For young learners, use age-appropriate classroom activities such as show-and-tell, songs, chants, language games, repetition, movement, and Total Physical Response.
• Make the language of familiar activities explicit; for example, teach “share” and “experience” as useful ways to introduce show-and-tell.
• For older students, use meaningful, cognitively challenging topics and explicitly teach the language needed to discuss them.

Provide Regular, Dedicated Instruction

Academic language instruction should support, not replace or diverge from, the core curriculum. Scarcella recommends daily vocabulary, reading-comprehension, and writing instruction, along with scaffolded oral-language instruction.

The amount of additional time should depend on students’ needs. She suggests that some K–3 students may need an additional daily block of about 40–45 minutes, while students in upper grades may need more than an hour of daily English instruction that includes academic language. Students with significant gaps or who arrive late in secondary school may need intensive programs, summer school, or before- or after-school instruction.

Teach Language Within Content Classes

Content teachers should support reading comprehension, discussion, vocabulary, and writing tied to their subjects; they need not become reading specialists or provide all foundational English instruction.

For example, biology teachers can use graphic organizers and note-taking strategies, scaffold academic discussion, teach biology vocabulary in context, and guide students through lab reports. Subject-specific vocabulary is best introduced in the subject where it is meaningful, then reinforced elsewhere.

Build Long-Term Independence

• Encourage students to use learner dictionaries, which provide definitions along with grammatical information, common word combinations, and example sentences.
• Continue feedback and instruction so students become independent users and editors of academic language.
• Avoid assuming that students will acquire academic language simply through time or exposure.

School Example and Resources

A segment at Heritage Elementary School in Oregon shows teachers supporting comprehension among children from a range of language backgrounds. Teachers explain vocabulary in students’ home language and in English, use a “picture walk” to connect images with background knowledge and predict a text’s subject, and deliberately slow reading so students engage more deeply with what they read.

The webcast also points viewers to Colorín Colorado resources and to a “What Works” website for research-based strategies. Scarcella cautions that academic language is difficult to assess and that proficiency tests offer only a partial picture of students’ academic abilities.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Delia Pompa — Host and interviewer.
• Dr. Robin Scarcella — Guest expert; Professor and Director of the Program in Academic Language and ESL at the University of California, Irvine, as described in the webcast.
• Linea Salzman — Heritage Elementary School teacher featured discussing vocabulary instruction.
• Larry Connolly — Heritage Elementary School teacher featured leading a picture-walk activity.
• Heritage Elementary School students — Unnamed students shown participating in classroom instruction.
• Vaughn — Scarcella’s former student, represented through two letters discussed and quoted in the interview.
• Unidentified segment narration/voiceover — Narration introducing the Heritage Elementary School report.
• Colorín Colorado — The webcast’s presenting organization and a cited source for further information.
• American Federation of Teachers and National Council of La Raza — Identified as funders; the AFT provided funding, with additional support from the National Council of La Raza.