Academic Vocabulary Sandra Brewer Language Arts Instructional Coach Muskogee Public Schools OWP-S. Brewer

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. OWP-S. Brewer/ Marzano,Pickerking

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” OWP-S. Brewer

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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano, Pickering

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 means 75 out of 100 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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano, Pickering

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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano, Pickering

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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano,Pickering

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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano,Pickering

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 » 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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano,Pickering

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. OWP-S. Brewer/Marzano,Pickering