Academic Language Mastery: Vocabulary in Context - Paperback

by Margarita Espino Calderon (Author), Ivannia Soto (Author)

By now it's a given: if we're to help our ELLs and SELs access the rigorous demands of today's content standards, we must cultivate the "code" that drives school success: academic language. Look no further for assistance than this much-anticipated series from Ivannia Soto, in which she invites field authorities Jeff Zwiers, David and Yvonne Freeman, Margarita Calderon, and Noma LeMoine to share every teacher's need-to-know strategies on the four essential components of academic language.

The subject of this volume is vocabulary. Here, Margarita Calderon reveals how vocabulary is best taught as a tool for completing and constructing more complex messages. With this book as your roadmap, you'll learn how to:

• Teach high-frequency academic words and discipline-specific vocabulary across content areas
• Utilize strategies for teaching academic vocabulary, moving students from Tier 1 to Tiers 2 and 3 words and selecting appropriate words to teach
• Assess vocabulary growth as you go

Our vocabulary instruction must come from the texts our ELLs and SELs are about to read, not from a set of activities that teach words in isolation. This guidebook will help you get started as early as tomorrow. Better yet, read all four volumes in the series and put in place an all-in-one instructional plan for closing the achievement gap.

Author Biography

Dr. Ivannia Soto is associate professor of Education at Whittier College, where she specializes in second language acquisition, systemic reform for English language learners (ELLs), and urban education. She began her career in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), where she taught English and English Language Development to a population made of up 99.9% Latinos, who either were or had been ELLs. Before becoming a professor, Dr. Soto also served LAUSD as a literacy coach and district office administrator. She has presented on literacy and language topics at various conferences, including the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), the California Association for Bilingual Association (CABE), the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the National Urban Education Conference. As a consultant, Soto has worked with Stanford University's School Redesign Network (SRN) and WestEd, as well as a variety of districts and county offices in California, providing technical assistance for systemic reform for ELLs and Title III. Soto is the co-author of The Literacy Gaps: Building Bridges for ELLs and SELs, as well as ELL Shadowing as a Catalyst for Change and From Spoken to Written Language with ELLs, all published by Corwin Press. Together, the books tell a story of how to systemically close achievement gaps with ELLs by increasing their oral language production in academic areas. Soto is Executive Director of the Institute for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching (ICLRT) at Whittier College, whose mission it is to promote relevant research and develop academic resources for ELLs and Standard English Learners (SELs) via linguistically and culturally responsive teaching practices.

Dr. Margarita Calderón is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University' School of Education. She serves on national panels and committees such as: National Research Council's Committee on Teacher Preparation, National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth, Carnegie Adolescent ELL Literacy Panel, The WIDA Formative Language Assessment Records for ELLs (FLARE) in Secondary School, National Institute for Family Literacy (NIFL) Multicultural Advisory, Professional Advisory Board of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, and ETS Visiting Panel on Research. She is principal investigator in a 5-year study in middle and high schools called ExC-ELL on professional development of science, social studies, and language arts teachers of ELLs, and RIGOR for teaching language, reading and content to SIFE, ELLs in Special Education, and Newcomers funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is Co-PI with Robert Slavin on the 5-year randomized evaluation of English immersion, transitional, and two-way bilingual elementary programs funded by the Institute for Education Sciences/U.S. Dept. of Education. Other research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Labor, National Institutes of Health, and Texas Education Agency. She has over 100 publications, is an international speaker, and conducts comprehensive professional development programs throughout the country