Transcript Academic Vocabulary - Muskogee Public School / Overview

Academic Vocabulary
Sandra Brewer
Language Arts Instructional Coach
Muskogee Public Schools
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Step 1: The teacher provides a description,
explanation, or example of the new term.
Tell a story that integrates the term.
Use video or computer images as the stimulus for
understanding the information.
Introduce direct experiences, such as a field trip or a guest
speaker, that
provide examples of the term.
Ask individual students or small groups, to do some initial
investigation and present to class in a skit or pantomime.
Use current events to help make the term applicable to
something familiar to students.
Describe your own mental pictures of the term.
Find or create pictures that exemplify the term.
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Example of Step 1
• The literary terms section of a textbook describes dialect as
“a way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular
region or of a particular group of people.” Instead of using
that definition, a teacher might read a short passage from
literature that illustrates a character speaking in dialect.
Here is an example of an African American dialect spoken
by a spunky young girl in the rural South.
• “So there I am in the navigator seat. And I turn to him and just plain
ole ax him. I mean I come right on out with it….And like my mama say,
Hazel—which is my real name and what she remembers to call me
when she bein serious—when you got somethin on your mind, speak
up and let the chips fall where they may. And if anybody don[‘t like it,
tell em to come see your mama.”
--Toni Cade Bambara from “Gorilla, My Love”
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Step 2: Ask students to restate the
description, explanation, or example in their
own words.
• Teachers monitor students’ work and help them
clear up confusions or errors.
• If students struggle, consider
providing additional descriptions,
explanations or examples,
allowing students to discuss the term with a
partner or small group
• Ask students to record their descriptions,
explanations, and examples in their academic
vocabulary notebooks.
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Examples of Step 2
• Jackson explained percent in his academic notebook this
way:
Percent means how many things there are out of 100 things. 75 percent
75 out of 100
means
• Jenna’s entry for onomatopoeia included the following:
Onomatopoeia means using a word that sounds like
the sound that it makes when you say it, like click. When
you say click, you actually click with your tongue.
• Sophie’s entry for Native American included the following:
Native means the first people who lived somewhere, so Native
American means the first people who lived in America. They lived
here before it was called America. We used to call them Indians, but
that did not make sense. They weren’t from India.
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Step 3: Ask students to construct a picture,
symbol, or graphic representing the term or
phrase.
• Students are forced to think of the term
nonlinquistically, a different learning strategy, which is
also effective.
• Be sure to model, model, model.
• Provide examples of students’ drawings and your own
drawings that are rough but that represent the ideas.
• Allow students, at first, to work together.
• Discuss the power of pictures.
• Go to the Internet and search for images for the term.
• Sometimes you can draw the actual thing, a symbol for
it, or an example of the term.
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Step 4: Engage students periodically in activities
that help them add to their knowledge of the
terms in their notebooks.
• Highlight a prefix or suffix that will help them
remember the meaning of the term.
• Identify synonyms or antonyms for the term.
• Draw an additional picture or graphic.
• List related words.
• Write brief cautions or reminders of common
confusions.
• Translate the term into another language, if
English is the student’s second language.
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Examples of Step 4
• When reviewing the term capital in the social
studies section, they might decide to write,
“Remember capitol, with an O, always refers to the
building.”
• When reviewing symbiosis, they might add,
“Related words: mutualism and parasitism.”
• If they were reexamining the term protagonist, they
might write, “Antonym—antagonist.”
• If an ELL student is reviewing the phrase seismic
wave, he or she might write, “In Spanish the phrase
is onda sismica.
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Step 5 Periodically ask students to discuss the terms with
one another.
•
Use the Think-Pair-Share strategy.
• Think: Provide a few minutes of quiet time to allow students, individually, to
review their own descriptions and images of the targeted terms
• Pair: Organize students into pairs and ask them to discuss their descriptions
and pictures of the terms with their partners. Guide them by modeling ways
to discuss the terms
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Compare their descriptions
Describe their pictures
Explain new information they have learned
Identify areas of disagreement or confusion to seek clarification.
• Share: Invite students to share aloud with the whole class any new thoughts
or understandings they have discussed in their pairs.
•
•
Encourage students to help each other to identify and clear up
misconceptions and confusion.
Activities can be unstructured and student-directed or structured with a
different method.
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Step 6: Involve students periodically in games
that allow them to play with terms.
• What is the question? Model the Jeopardy television show by
creating a game matrix on an overhead transparency or a white
board, or as a slide using PowerPoint.
• Vocabulary Charades. Students may individually or in groups guess
the term that is being acted out.
• Name That Category. Modeled after the television show The
$100,000 Pyramid, students focus on attributes of concepts
represented by or associated with terms as they try to determine
what the terms in a list have in common.
• Draw Me. Modeled after Pictionary, players draw pictures as clues
to help teammates identify an academic term.
• Talk a Mile a Minute. Modeled after the game Scattergories, a
student names several words associated with a category to get the
team to name the category.
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