Oral Language

See Reading Rockets research based reading strategies and resources organized by phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary and writing.

See Vocabulary Toolbox for strategies to support vocabulary instruction.

Pre-teach new vocabulary.

• Use the seven step vocabulary process to preview new vocabulary.

Provide opportunities for students to visualize key academic vocabulary.

• Visuwords (a visual dictionary/thesaurus) allows students to see related words and their definitions.
• Visual Dictionary allows the user to type in a word and get a visual picture to support the definition.

Create word walls that incorporate important vocabulary.

• Try vocabulary graffiti. When the vocabulary words are associated with subject specific concepts, have the student create word posters. Provide recognition for good work by transforming the student work into the class word wall.
• Use an alphabox to have students activate students' prior knowledge about a topic but also to collect vocabulary during a unit of study. It is like the student's own personal word wall. If this graphic organizer is given to students at the beginning of a unit, they can fill in all of the vocabulary they know about that topic. The teacher can quickly assess student knowledge. As the unit progresses, students add to the AlphaBoxes as new words are introduced.

Incorporate or add movement for key academic vocabulary.

• See video for teacher example of including movement into content area class.
• See video of teaching using total physical response during transition time to support academic vocabulary.

Provide graphic organizers that support conceptual understanding of key academic and content area vocabulary.

• See link to video of how to one teacher uses a Frayer model.
• See link to webinar that explains multiple organizers to support direct and indirect vocabulary instruction.

Model the use of talk moves across all content area including referring to anchor charts and sentence frames.

• See resources for incorporating math talk moves.
• Provide students sentence frames or stems.
• Allow multiple opportunities for students to use a choral response to say the word.