Oral Language

See list of strategies for vocabulary, writing, and comprehension on Adolescent Literacy site.

See Vocabulary Toolbox for strategies to support vocabulary instruction.

Provide opportunities for students preview new concepts.

Pre-teach new vocabulary.

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.

Provide opportunities for students to visualize key academic vocabulary.

Vocabhead provides videos for many Tier 2 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.

Provide opportunities for repeated practice of key academic vocabulary.

Quizlet provides students opportunities to use online tool for repeated practice of vocabulary words.
Total Physical Response (TPR) is a method of teaching language or vocabulary concepts by using physical movement to react to verbal input. See video.

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.
Incorporate turn and talk into daily lesson.
Provide students sentence frames or stems. See link for sentence starters for responding to text and for math.
Allow multiple opportunities for students to use a choral response to say the word.

Incorporate use of technology tools to support formative assessment of vocabulary.

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