The Why

"...those from academically advantaged environments and those from academically disadvantaged environments--enter school with significant discrepancies in terms of their chances for academic success. Unfortunately, as time progresses, the gap in academic background knowledge grows even larger, as does the gap in academic achievement between the two groups.

Given the importance of academic background knowledge and the fact that vocabulary is such an essential aspect of it, one of the most crucial services that teachers can provide, particularly for students who do not come from academically advantages backgrounds, is systematic instruction in important academic terms."

- Marzano & Pickering, 2005

The What

Focus on Tier II words to help your students get the most mileage out of their vocabulary studies. Although Marzano and Pickering, Beck and Mckeown, and many other authorities have focused on word knowledge, students also need to understand and use "academic language."

Academic language includes more than just vocabulary words. Norman Herr, PhD., Professor of of Science Education at California State University, Northridge writes that "Academic language is the language needed by students to do the work in schools. It includes, for example, discipline-specific vocabulary, grammar and punctuation, and applications of rhetorical conventions and devices that are typical for a content area (e.g., essays, lab reports, discussions of a controversial issue.)"

Therefore, in order to develop our students' academic language skills, we will need to consider grammar and "rhetorical conventions and devices," or the phrases we typically use when conversing about an academic topic. So, when we want to contribute to a collaborative planning meeting with our peers, we may preface our idea with "I'd like to suggest..." When adding to the idea or claim of another we start with "To add to what So-and-So said, it is also possible that ...."

Dr. Herr emphasizes that we must consider the "language demands of a learning task" as a part of our lesson planning. Here is a document designed to help identify the important elements in developing a language objective for content area lessons. Thinking ahead and identifying the ways an educated person uses language (the function) to speak about the academic content within the lesson helps to understand which language to teach.