Develop students' understanding of academic language and watch literacy skills soar! To achieve higher levels of learning, students must be able to understand academic language-the formalized language of instruction found in classrooms, textbooks, and standardized tests. Eli R Johnson conveys a powerful message of the need for teachers to provide explicit academic language instruction for all students, especially English language learners or those struggling with reading. Filled with 36 hands-on strategies, this practical ...

Fast-paced, practical, and innovative, this text for pre-service and in-service teachers features clear, easily accessible lessons and professional development activities to improve the delivery of academic language/literacy education across the content areas in junior/middle school and high school classrooms. Numerous hands-on tools and techniques demonstrate the effectiveness of content-area instruction for students in a wide variety of school settings, particularly English language learners, struggling readers, and other special populations of students. Based on a strong professional development model the authors have been instrumental in designing, Academic Language/Literacy Strategies for Adolescents addresses: motivation attributes of academic language vocabulary: theory and practice reading skills development grammar and writing. A wealth of charts, graphs, and lesson plans give clear examples of academic language/literacy strategies in action. The appendices – a key component of the practical applications developed in the text – include a glossary, exemplary lessons that address key content areas, and a Grammar Handbook. In this era of increased accountability, coupled with rapid demographic change and challenges to traditional curricula and pedagogical methods, educators will find this book to be a great resource.

The editors and contributors to this collection explore what it means to adopt an “academic literacies” approach in policy and pedagogy. Transformative practice is illustrated through case studies and critical commentaries from teacher-researchers working in a range of higher education contexts—from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, across disciplines, and spanning geopolitical regions including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cataluña, Finland, France, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.

South African universities face major challenges in meeting the needs of their students in the area of academic language and literacy. The dominant medium of instruction in the universities is English and, to a much lesser extent, Afrikaans, but only a minority of the national population are native speakers of these languages. Nine other languages can be media of instruction in schools, which makes the transition to tertiary education difficult enough in itself for students from these schools. The focus of this book is on procedures for assessing the academic language and literacy levels and needs of students, not in order to exclude students from higher education but rather to identify those who would benefit from further development of their ability in order to undertake their degree studies successfully. The volume also aims to bring the innovative solutions designed by South African educators to a wider international audience.

This edited book brings together an international cast of contributors to examine how academic literacy is learned and mastered in different tertiary education settings around the world. Bringing to the fore the value of qualitative enquiry through ethnographic methods, the authors illustrate in-depth descriptions of genre knowledge and academic literacy development in first and second language writing. All of the data presented in the chapters are original, as well as innovative in the field in terms of content and scope, and thought-provoking regarding theoretical, methodological and educational approaches. The contributions are also representative of both novice and advanced academic writing experiences, providing further insights into different stages of academic literacy development throughout the career-span of a researcher. Set against the backdrop of internationalisation trends in Higher Education and the pressure on multilingual academics to publish their research outcomes in English, this volume will be of use to academics and practitioners interested in the fields of Languages for Academic Purposes, Applied Linguistics, Literacy Skills, Genre Analysis and Acquisition and Language Education.

Create unit plans that will empower your EL students In this supremely practical book, award-winning principal Ruth Swinney and college professor Patricia Velasco focus on the careful planning needed to develop the academic language of all students. For English learners especially, it is critically important to integrate language development with the content that the curriculum demands. What makes this book unlike any other is the detailed guidance it provides to: • Help students advance from social to academic language • Encourage verbal expression in the classroom • Plan language arts, social studies, and science lessons that connect language and content • Use shared reading and writing, read alouds, and conversation to teach language skills Hands-on tools include graphic organizers, sample lesson plans, concept maps, semantic webbing, word walls, and worksheets—everything teachers need to help emergent bilingual and struggling students master the academic language they need to excel in school.