Literacy

In school, students learn in an inherently language-dependent way. For those who are native speakers of the dominant language, this may not be a conscious factor in their learning of content (although it still may be), but for many students in the classroom, the language used to communicate content is a barrier in and of itself.

As such, if the educator's final goal is to communicate their content as effectively as possible, removing the barriers language introduces is a crucial step in the teaching process. This can be done through modeling the use of academic language, by providing supports like sentence frames or starters, and by giving explicit literacy lessons when appropriate.

Here are just a few of the ways I promote literacy in my classroom:

Intentionally and explicitly building up academic vocabulary

Solving vs. Evaluating equations_ Step-by-step guide.pdf

Although some students come from contexts (familial, educational, societal, etc.) where academic vocabulary is used often, others do not. As such, it is important for the teacher to recognize that students may not have even the most basic lingual building blocks for our subject.

For example, students may never have been taught (in fact, it is likely that they haven't been) the difference between solving and evaluating an equation. Above is a graphic organizer/notes sheet I created to help address this specific case (although many more notes sheets like this one could, and should, be created to support student understanding of content through academic language).

Incorporating supports that allow all students to engage

Not all students come to the classroom with the same set of skills—in particular, students' backgrounds with English vary vastly (native speakers included!). Knowing this, it's crucial to scaffold writing activities with language supports that students can access easily.

To do this in my classroom, I do my best to provide word banks, sentence frames and starters, and define vocabulary terms clearly (as well as using them clearly in my own instruction). As can be seen in the example above, this kind of scaffolding can empower students to write clearly and in an academic register.

Learning the language of math... symbols

Beyond the traditional academic language found in the humanities, STEM (and arguably math in particular) introduces a whole new level of language for students: symbols. It's easy to forget that although as a teacher, these symbols immediately trigger the words with which they are associated, for students, they are truly a whole new language.

Above is an example of how I help students learn the language of math and the meaning of the symbols we use to help them make sense of what they're learning.

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