In this study, we examine the unique and shared contributions of Spanish and English core academic language skills (CALS) to English reading comprehension in a population of Spanish-English dual language learners in Grades 4 and 5 (n = 165). We focus on cross-disciplinary CALS, operationalized as sets of high-utility lexical, syntactic and…

Students who struggle with reading comprehension in middle school often lack the academic vocabulary the need to understand grade-level textbooks and other instructional materials. Research shows that to learn a new word well, students need to encounter and use it multiple times in different contexts. The authors describe Word Generation, a…

A quasi-experimental study of a novel, cross-content area vocabulary intervention program called "Word Generation" showed significantly greater growth among 6th- to 8th-grade students in schools implementing the program than in comparison schools, on a curriculum-specific test. Furthermore, the language-minority students in the…