This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly…

A lack of familiarity with the lexical, grammatical, and discursive features associated with academic language presents comprehension challenges for many adolescent readers, especially those with still-developing English language skills. Although many studies focused on reading comprehension in content areas, the prevalent use of standardized…

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I…

Recently a novel instrument -- the Core Academic Language Instrument (CALS-I) -- aimed at testing a constellation of school-relevant English language skills was developed and validated for use in the United States (Uccelli, Barr, Dobbs, Galloway, Meneses and Sánchez, 2015. Core Academic Language Skills: An expanded operational construct and a…

Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of 6th grade students with Learning Disabilities, over half of whom were also English Language Learners (ELL), to implement about 15 minutes of…

Students from refugee background enter Australian schools to pursue their educational goal. Though most do well academically, a few encounter educational difficulties and struggle to acquire English language. An exploratory qualitative case study approach was used to investigate factors contributing to poor development of English language and…

Academic vocabulary development is critical to the success of all learners--particularly English language learners (ELLs). This article presents a framework for integrating explicit academic vocabulary instruction for ELLs into middle school classrooms. The framework embodies five research-based principles and serves as a vehicle for structuring…

The language that students are learning in mathematics classrooms is intimately tied to the mathematics they are learning. The goal for any lesson or unit is for all students to be able to understand the mathematics they read or hear and be able to speak and write about that mathematics. Structured vocabulary placement can support that dual…

This report is part of a long-term collaboration of the Quality Teaching for English Learners initiative at WestEd with the Fort Worth Independent School District. The focus of this report is on comparisons between ninth grade newcomers and other groups of English language learners (ELLs). Analyses compare newcomers to 1) long-term ELLs who were…

Despite the current theoretical momentum for the importance of academic English and the acknowledgment that academic materials increase in complexity through the grades, little empirical attention has been devoted to the role of academic English in academic achievement. This study examined the amount of variance in academic achievement explained…

Newcomer students who arrive in the secondary grades face daunting challenges in order to achieve desired academic outcomes such as high school graduation and college access. Besides simultaneously developing conceptual understandings analytical and linguistic practices, newcomers also need to adapt to a new country, a new schooling system, and a…

One dimension of language proficiency considered important for reading and writing academic texts is morphological awareness--the understanding of how complex words are formed from meaningful smaller units (i.e., affixes, roots) that contribute to words' meanings and functions. This quasi-experimental study evaluated the effects of instruction on…

This quantitative study explored the impact of literacy integration in a science inquiry classroom involving the use of science notebooks on the academic language development and conceptual understanding of students from diverse (i.e., English Language Learners, or ELLs) and low socio-economic status (low-SES) backgrounds. The study derived from a…

Use of research-based practices for improving content area literacy of English learners is important both because of their growing numbers and their overall poor academic performance. However, how do we ensure that teachers are implementing proven methods with fidelity? This study shows the direct relationship between teachers' level of…