Education

Resource: Teaching ‘Academic Language’

By Mary Ann Zehr — April 23, 2009 1 min read
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Over at my other blog, Curriculum Matters, I’ve written about Word Generation: Middle School Literacy Development Using Academic English, a new Web tool with resources for teaching “academic language.” That is the words, abstract phrases, and grammatical structures students need to know to understand school subjects. Before I browsed the resources in this tool, frankly, I didn’t really realize that it’s so important to explicitly teach academic English to all students, not just ELLs.

Word Generation seems to have some rich resources that can help educators to crack the mystery of how they can support students to learn the language of school effectively. The sample videos from actual classrooms are particularly captivating.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.