 So, I'm going to talk about academic vocabulary, and before watching this video, have a discussion about what you think academic vocabulary is. Academic vocabulary is the word knowledge that students need in order to understand and engage with texts used in school. It's the vocabulary critical to understanding the concepts of content taught. Academic language is used at all grade levels, although it frequency increases as students get older. Academic vocabulary includes terms in the content areas such as ecosystem and photosynthesis, as well as other words derived from Greek and Latin root words such as analyze and describe. It includes not only words, but how words are put together to convey complex ideas. In this example, even though bats have wings, they are not birds. Students need to know the meaning of key words such as bats and wings, but they also have to know the meaning of, even though, to fully understand the meaning of the sentence. Dutro refers to these words as bricks and mortar words. Bricks are the key vocabulary such as bats and wings, and can be specific to the content being taught. Bricks and mortar are the words that connect the key words together, and yet they're essential to comprehension, such as have, at, and to, and even though. So why teach vocabulary? Academic vocabulary is necessary for ELLs to acquire academic language. As you can see from these quotes, many researchers emphasize the importance of vocabulary development. It's crucial, it's critical to literacy instruction for ELLs, and if we think about it from the other way, a lack of vocabulary can contribute to school failure. And the research is also clear that vocabulary is linked to reading comprehension. Therefore teaching vocabulary can improve reading comprehension for both native English speakers and definitely for our English language learners. And here's another quote that's supported by the research. Vocabulary is essential for the reading success of English language learners. So we know that teaching vocabulary is important. How many words do students need when we're talking about teaching vocabulary? What are we talking about? So if you think of a typical five-year-old beginning school, how many words do you think they have? How many words do they come to school with? And you can also try to fill in the blanks for these other statements. So a five-year-old that begins kindergarten has about 5,000 words. And those include words and their derivatives. So we have stop, stopped, and stopping counts as three words. Students need about 3,000 words a year to keep up. Third graders have about 15,000 words. Sixth graders about 25,000 words. And high school students have anywhere between 50 and 85,000 words. The good news is that vocabulary learning is cumulative. When a person begins to learn new words, you learn words that are related in meaning, synonyms, antonyms, and then vocabulary grows exponentially. The point of sharing this, the number of words that students need, is two-fold. You can see how much academic vocabulary is acquired over a student's time at school. But you can also see how many words ELLs need to acquire to catch up to their English-speaking peers. If an English speaker needs 3,000 words a year to keep up, then an English language learner is going to need 4,400 to 4,500 words to catch up to that English speaker. What does effective vocabulary instruction look like? Have a discussion with your colleagues about what you think the components of an effective vocabulary program are. So research has shown that teachers do know that vocabulary instruction is important, and teachers say that they do teach vocabulary. What isn't clear for teachers, however, is how to best teach vocabulary so that it has an impact on academic achievement. Too often, vocabulary instruction is limited due to lack of time, or it involves simply a definition or an assignment rather than the actual teaching of words. What is missing is direct instruction in academic vocabulary that will support students as they read expository texts. So what does effective vocabulary instruction look like? Instruction must be vigorous, strong, and powerful in effect. And that comes from Beck McEwen and Kuchen, who wrote, Bringing Words to Life, Robust Vocabulary Instruction. And Michael Graves says that we need to intervene early, and we need a systematic approach to vocabulary instruction. And he wrote the vocabulary book. Finding time for that direct and systematic instruction is a challenge. So I've compiled these guidelines from the research for effective vocabulary instruction, and I will elaborate on each point later. So we want to provide direct instruction on words and their meanings. We want to be selective about which words we're going to teach. We want to provide multiple exposures to the targeted words. We want to give students opportunities to extend their word knowledge. We want to foster word consciousness and encourage wide reading. So let's look at the first guideline. Provide direct instruction on words and their meanings. We need to provide instruction that includes the contextual information about that word as well as the meaning. I'm going to model what direct instruction of a word might look like to showcase this strategy. After viewing, discuss the strategies that you think you saw in this example. So we're going to look at a sentence that was in our story today. Pam is responsible for the care of her grandmother after school. We're going to talk about the word responsible. Responsible is an adjective, a word that is used to describe a person. Listen to me say it. Responsible. Now let's say it together slowly. Responsible. Let's say it again slowly. Responsible. Now let's say it together quickly. I'll say it first. Responsible. Responsible. And say it again. Responsible. Responsible means the control or care of someone else in this sentence. It involves important duties. Pam had a job to do after school. She took care of her grandmother. She was responsible for her grandmother. When you get your homework done at night, you are being responsible. When teachers are on the playground at recess time and they're taking care of the safety of the students, they are being responsible. The other day I noticed that Sam cleaned up the art table after everyone was finished painting. I thought he was being responsible to do that. When someone has a pet, what are some of the things that you need to do to take care of your pet to be responsible? So if you did not take care of your pet, I want you to put your thumbs up if you're being responsible. Thumbs up if you weren't being responsible by not feeding your pet. When have you been responsible? Can you think of a time when you have been responsible? And here's the beginning of the sentence for you to use. I have been responsible when? Now we're going to record the word responsible in our personal dictionary. So the students then record the word with a definition and a memory hook in their own personal dictionary. So what are the strategies that you noticed? Some of the strategies that you noticed might be, the students saw the word in context and the word was discussed in context. The teacher gave a brief meaning for the word and told the students what the part of speech was. The students had an opportunity to say the word quickly and first of all, slowly and then quickly. Far too often, the teacher is the only person who pronounces and uses academic vocabulary. This step is important so that students correctly pronounce the word slowly so that they see each part and how it's pronounced and then quickly to develop fluency. Students then heard a student-friendly definition of the word. So teachers need to not only give the meaning but explain the word and give different examples based, if you can, on the student's own background and knowledge. Students hear the examples of the word in different contexts. They're going to need to hear two or three examples to firmly grasp the meaning. And then students hear the word in a sentence in another context related to their experience such as teachers on the playground. The thumbs up and thumbs down activity is a quick assessment for the teacher to see if the students have grasped the meaning. If some students haven't, the teacher could reteach that word in a smaller group. And then sentences are generated for students to use the word and you'll notice that there were sentence frames provided to give that support. If the students can relate the word to their own experience by generating a sentence they're better able to retain the word. Then they recorded the word in their own personal dictionary for future reference in writing and reading. This promotes student engagement. It helps them keep track of the words they're learning and it provides some accountability. An optional piece would be to break the word down into parts and talk about prefixes and suffixes and root words. Then this word is revisited many times over the next few days, weeks, and months so that it is retained and used. Teaching words and their meanings in this way requires a lot of time and preparation. For example, it's helpful to think of a student friendly definition ahead of time and to look up the original source of the word. So because it's a high intensity, time consuming task, teachers need to select words carefully. A strategic plan is needed and I will talk about that in the next video clip. Thank you.