Building Academic Vocabulary and Grammar

The following example comes from PETAA book Teaching with Intent: Scaffolding academic language with marginalised students, written by Dr Bronwyn Parkin and Dr Helen Harper.

An essential strategy for building academic meaning is to make sure we explicitly teach the vocabulary and grammar that students will need in order to sound authoritative. It is true that students can begin to create and convey scientific meaning through non-linguistic means: through the actual components of the electric circuit, and their diagrammatic representations, for example. But unless they can also talk in an authoritative and accurate way about those concrete objects, we cannot be sure whether they are understanding the scientific concepts and purpose, or simply enjoying the novelty of playing with wires, batteries and light globes. Without language, there is no guarantee that students will link their play with abstract understandings about the nature of electric currents. So our role as teachers is to set students up to appropriate the scientific language, both vocabulary and grammar, to represent those understandings.

Importantly, we can start to build scientific language right at the beginning of the sequence, initially in context and through talk. This language can be reinforced through questioning and by encouraging students to give back the scientific terms in their contributions. The new language can be recorded as class notes, providing visual support both during the class discussion and again later, when the students move to writing.

In an example provided below, Michael and Louise are two year 7 teachers in South Australia, who share a class. They were teaching a lunar eclipse sequence as a team and were able to split roles. Michael presented new material to the class and led the class discussion, while Louise took on the role of 'note-taker.' At the start of the first lesson, Louise made her role explicit to the students, 'thinking aloud' that she would be recording the most important language in note form, accurately, so that they could draw on it when they came to write their explanation. 

Here is an example of the teachers introducing new language as Michael explains a diagram showing the Earth 'casting a shadow' on the moon:

Michael: (Pointing to his diagram) On the moon, we don't see the sun's light reflected, so it is in shadow, it's dark, or not having light getting to the moon. So we use the words 'cast a shadow': something casts a shadow, which means this thing causes a shadow to occur.

Louise: That's something I should write in my notes.

Note that Michael and Louise avoided recording vocabulary in word walls or word lists. Word walls can only record vocabulary. Instead, the teachers used class notes, visually arranging them in such a way that they recorded vocabulary and they pre-empted the structure of the class text: the notes served a purpose of looking both backward and forward.

Class notes can not only flag vocabulary, but also the grammatical resources that you can use in negotiating a class text. For example, Louise used the '-ing' form of the verb, writing 'casting a shadow' so that the grammatical structure would  be more easily accessible during the negotiated writing. The teachers also talked about, and wrote up, the lavels (that is, the meta-language) that they would later use to structure their writing, labelling the lunar eclipse as a 'phenomenon', labelling direct alignment as a 'condition' and casting a shadow on the moon as an 'effect'.

Class notes are also useful for making spelling visible at the moment when students first hear the words, although we don't need to interrupt the flow of meaningful conversation to teach spelling at that point. This is better left until after the joint written construction of the text, when the meanings have been consolidated, and before students have independently written their text. When there is less cognitive load, we have time to focus explicitly on teaching how words are structured (for example, studying the prefixes and suffixes that create meanings in science), exploring the etymologies of words, and formally teaching the grammatical features of the written text.