The National Center for Research on the Educational
Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners
A research program funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Adapting Texts to English Language Learners' Needs

Catherine E. Snow, Ph.D., Harvard Graduate School of Education

 

A major obstacle to success in reading comprehension for ELLs in the middle grades is their unfamiliarity with the vocabulary they encounter in their content area textbooks.  Content area teachers report that they focus on teaching vocabulary, but closer analysis reveals that the words taught in content area classrooms are disciplinary words—photosynthesis and nutrition in science classes, legislative and battalion in social studies.  Unfortunately the academic words used across disciplines—often to define the disciplinary words—are not dealt with by any of the content area teachers and thus are missed altogether. These words—such as process, compare, interpret, distinguish, and so on—are crucial to comprehension across content areas.  ELLs (and native English speakers from low-language environments) are extremely unlikely to know these words, and must be taught them in the classroom in order to learn them.  Word Generation is a vocabulary support program designed to be used in middle schools across all content areas: it uses engaging paragraphs to present these all-purpose academic words as well as activities to help students learn them. It is being developed with support from the Strategic Education Research Partnership and formatively evaluated in Boston Public Middle Schools; the CREATE component of the project is developing alternative, simpler forms of the paragraphs to make them more accessible to ELLs. The ELL-accessible paragraphs will provide a basis for a modified, ELL-focused version of Word Generation.

 

Featured Resources

Read more about Word Generation. pdf

 

Information about this study was presented at the 2007 CREATE Conference. Browse the conference materials section for the transcript and handouts from the presentation, related readings, and more.