2. Agenda
1. Opening Activity: Glummer and who?
2. Turn and Talk: Reading in a ‘new’ language
3. Group Discussion: What did Glummer
show us?
4. Mind the Gap: Reflect and post your
suggestions
5. Brainstorming: Partnerships brainstorm
strategies
6. What’s Next: Whole-group share of best
practices
Objective: Collaborate in creating a bank
of vocabulary-building strategies for ELLs
4. Glummer and Breetib were in the plozee tecking
grulby wernies and voding zibby kinnups.
Glummer’s kinnups looked naffostical! But
Breetib’s kinnups were too slunky.
1. Where were Glummer and Breetib?
2. What were they doing there?
3. How did Glummer’s kinnups look?
4. How were Breetib’s kinnups?
5. What can Breetib do to improve his kinnups?
6. Is the plozee a good choice for tecking and voding?
Why or Why not?
6. Turn and Talk Protocol
My questions and
observations:
My partner’s questions and
observations:
● I’m wondering if…
● I noticed that…
● My partner, _______,
is curious to know if…
● My partner, _______,
noticed that…
Guiding Questions:
1.What was it like to read a text in a foreign language?
2.How did you begin to ‘decode’ the text?
3.Why were you able to figure out some of the text?
4.What strategies did you use?
7. What does Glummer and Breetib
show us?
● Learning to read in a second (or new) language
can be…
● Fortunately, once you have a basic
understanding of ___________, you can begin
to…
● As language specialists, we have the opportunity
to help students unlock some of these keys to
8. Group Share Out
After discussing Glummer’s naffostical kinnups…
●What were some of your partner’s observations or
questions?
●What were some things you agreed on? Looked at
differently?Similar approaches Different approaches
9. Why is vocabulary is so essential to
literacy development and content-area
learning?
Mind the Gap
10. Vocabulary Gap
Middle and high school ELLs are often talented at basic
interpersonal communication skills (BICS), which often
masks their difficulty in attaining content and academic
literacy proficiency.
Central to this discrepancy between the two is the
vocabulary load that middle and high school learners
suddenly face. Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimate
that students need to know 88,500 word families to
understand their content-area texts (in Fisher,
Rothenberg, and Frey (2007), yet Nagy and Herman
(1984) found that only 10% of needed vocabulary was
learned through direct instruction.
http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/supporting-vocabulary-
acquisition-english-30104.html
11. Impact of Limited Vocabulary on
Comprehension
● For younger students, deficits in vocabulary and
background knowledge can limit their comprehension
of grade-level, content-area concepts.
● For older students, their level of vocabulary
acquisition directly impacts their reading fluency and
comprehension (Barnett, 2001).
● Unless students know 85-95% of the words they
read, comprehension is impeded (Samuels, 2002).
● You cannot explicitly address all of the vocabulary
that your students will encounter.
● Not to worry! There are skills and strategies that
students can use to continuously build academic
12. What can we do to support our
ELLs?
Teachers must make Tier 2 and 3
vocabulary learning a priority to
ensure that English learners can
access the Common Core
curriculum.
●Vocabulary instruction must be explicit and
targeted, with attention to visual, auditory,
and tactile learning styles.
●Vocabulary must also be taught in context:
through reading, writing, and discussing
content-area topics.
●Targeted vocabulary must be incorporated
into the guiding questions and language
patterns used to steer lessons and
discussions.
15. Collaboratively designing strategies that
meet individual student needs
● Strategically including visuals, props, real-life
experiences, and other avenues to language
learning.
● Integrating the language modalities within literacy
lessons to provide more interactive learning
experiences.
17. High Quality Oral Language
Collaborative Learning Experiences
❖Shared texts which include specific text structures and
vocabulary.
❖Interactive writing experiences which highlight key
vocabulary.
❖Role-plays and readers’ theatre.
Turn and Talk Strategies
❖Guiding questions which incorporate: (1) specific
sentence patterns and (2) targeted vocabulary.
❖Sentence and paragraph frames to support students
in drafting, orally rehearsing, and revising their writing.
18. Direct Instruction
● Explicit teaching of vocabulary makes content-
area learning more comprehensible for ELLs.
● ELLs need a variety of strategies when learning
vocabulary:
● Word-work, focused on a set of weekly vocabulary
words
● Personal word (sentence) walls, in student
notebooks
● Visuals, sound clips, and artifacts to make meaning
more concrete
● Graphic organizers and language frames
19. Graphic Organizers and
Language Frames
Guiding
questions and
language
frames to
support
students in
extending their
language.
20. Activities for Different Learning
Styles
Example from
Read, Write,
Think:
(Grades 3 – 12)
http://www.read
writethink.org
Tactile Learners: Cubing
21. Build Background Knowledge
● During our
Renaissance unit, 5th-
grade students visited
the Metropolitan
Museum of Art ~ NYC.
● Media clips focused
on content themes
● Project-based learning
experiences and trips
● Manipulatives to make
words more concrete
● Graphic organizers to
support note-taking
22. Explicit Instruction in Text Types
● Introducing students to rigorous texts, rich in
vocabulary
● Modeling strategies for annotating and breaking
apart complex texts, with a focus on different text
types:
● Cause and effect
● Problem and solution
● Sequence of events
● Describing and listing
● Highlighting and practicing text types, in different
contexts:
● Turn and talk, using guiding questions
24. Feedback Form
What are you taking
away from today’s
workshop?
● Provide 2 or 3 ideas or
suggestions from
today’s work:
What questions do you
still have?
● Share some questions
you still have:
