5 Methods to Improve Student Academic Vocabulary

1. Read
One of the major methods to improve students’ academic vocabulary is to read extensively—academic essays,
reports, and excerpts from content textbooks. In this way, students will be exposed to a number of different
academic words, some of them from their future majors.
2. Keep a Word Journal
Studies show that students not only need to be exposed to higher-level vocabulary, but they also need to work with
it in order to acquire it and make it a part of their own vocabularies. One way to do this is the use of a word journal,
in which students record at least three new words they have encountered in each reading, a definition, the part of
speech, and a new sentence with the word. This provides some extra processing to help students assimilate the new
word into their own vocabularies.
3. Teach Morphology
Learning morphology, or the parts of words, is an excellent way to help students decode new academic words.
Again, academic vocabulary is multisyllabic, and most of these syllables, or morphemes, carry their own meaning. As
a simple example, words that end in “—ment” in academic English are almost always abstract nouns: government,
employment, containment, etc. In another example, “morphology” is comprised of two morphemes, “morpho” or
shape, form, and “—ology,” meaning “study of.” So “morphology” is the study of (word) forms.
4. Set up Discussion Groups
To further acquire academic vocabulary, students can be assigned groups, given a specific academic topic, such as
gun control and the United States, and some academic vocabulary to go with it: “legislation,” “Congress,” “(Second)
Amendment,” and so on. They can then discuss what they think about how gun control is practiced in the United
States, using the vocabulary assigned.
5. Essays
Finally students can write essays on academic topics, like the difference in the legislative process, or how laws are
passed, between the U.S. and other countries. This topic, unlike more common topics like “My Favorite Place,” is
more likely to draw on academic vocabulary because even to discuss such an abstract process as passing laws I will
need abstract, multisyllabic words, unlike those used in describing specific places.

5 things you need to know about Academic Vocabulary

1. Form & families: With any vocabulary learning, recognising the spelling and pronunciation of a word is generally a
starting point and from there, the learner needs to become familiar with inflected forms (plurals, verb forms, etc.). In
an academic context, being able to switch between different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) is
also vital. When constructing (or decoding) the longer, more tightly-packed sentences typical of the genre, being
able to flip between an adjective and noun form, for example, can make the difference between a smooth, coherent
sentence and a slightly awkward, ambiguous one. Abstract nouns (significance, reliability, establishment), in
particular, are must-knows for the academic writer. Knowing that reliability is the noun form of the more common
adjective reliable is really helpful. Better still is recognising that adjectives ending –able can typically be transformed
into nouns ending –ability. And being able to add the appropriate negative prefix (unreliability) might help construct
that killer sentence.
3. Collocations & chunks: If students are to use words productively, then they need to understand the kind of words
they are used together with: collocations, dependent prepositions and fixed phrases. Again, this is true of all
vocabulary, but academic writing has its own set of specialist collocates, the correct choice of which might not just
ensure a more fluent, natural style, but might affect the message the writer is trying to convey in important ways.
For example, the difference between being responsible to (the directors are responsible to shareholders) and
responsible for (the manager is responsible for the safety of staff) could make all the difference in an academic
essay.
4. Grammar: I’ve written before about the importance of understanding ‘word grammar’ in EAP. For example, going
back to those key abstract nouns, when you need to ensure that the verb in a sentence agrees with the head noun in
a long noun phrase, you need to know whether that noun is countable or uncountable. What’s more, words that are
typically uncountable in everyday usage (like behaviour) can be used countably in some specialist academic contexts.
5. Register & connotation: Finally, getting a feel for which words are appropriate to use to convey your intended
meaning in a particular context takes time, plenty of reading and noticing. It involves understanding formal and
informal words (get vs purchase), strength of meaning (unsatisfactory vs appalling), positive and negative
connotations (tough vs challenging) and appropriate terms to talk about potentially sensitive topics (e.g. patients
with mental health issues).

4 Keys To Developing Academic Vocabulary

1. Modeling
Most of your vocabulary came from being immersed in contexts where it was understood, through meaningful
interactions with more linguistically proficient people. For example, your parents, more advanced peers, or the
fancy-speaking adults in your life. Our first tool for helping students develop academic language is to Speak It! In
other words, when speaking to your students, embed fancy low-frequency words wherever the context of those
words will be clear. Where it is not clear, add a synonymous word or clause. For example, “Michael, I’d like you to
dispose of that properly by putting it in the trashcan.”
3. Interactions
Total Participation Techniques (TPTs) refer to teaching techniques that provide teachers with evidence of
active participation and cognitive engagement from all students at the same time. A key component to using TPTs
effectively is that whenever teachers pose prompts that require higher-order thinking, the prompts are processed
first by each individual student, then shared in pairs or small groups, and finally, shared with the class.
It is different than a traditional Q & A in that students are each expected to provide the teacher with
evidence that they processed the higher-order prompt. We call this process The Ripple, or Ripple Questioning,
because it reminds us of a visual of a ripple, where the prompt is represented by a pebble dropped in a pond. The
initial plunk of the pebble represents each individual student processing the prompt, followed by the concentric
circles, which represent the sharing out, first as small groups, then to the larger group. There are many advantages
to rippling and using TPTs over traditional approaches to teaching.
One of these advantages is that TPTs help teachers create opportunities for classroom interactions where
students are expected to talk to each other about the content. It provides the perfect setting for students of differing
academic language proficiencies to have content-based discussions that make use of, and model, academic language
within contexts that students understand.
4. Direct Instruction
Activities like asking students to role play or draw the word meanings, even for the most abstract words, can be a
useful strategy to help students to analyze the word meanings and link them to relevant visual images that will be
remembered far more effectively than if you had only relied on verbal explanations of word meanings. Though not
as contextually meaningful as acquiring words by being immersed in language-rich contexts, explicitly teaching
words remains an important component of building students’ academic vocabulary.

Enriching Academic Vocabulary: Strategies for Teaching Tier Two Words to E.L.L.
Students
As you likely already know, the Common Core Standards use the research of Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown to
categorize words into Tiers One, Two and Three. Here is how the Standards describe the tiers:
• Tier One words are the words of everyday speech usually learned in the early grades, albeit not at the same
rate by all children. They are not considered a challenge to the average native speaker, though English
language learners of any age will have to attend carefully to them.
• Tier Two words are far more likely to appear in written texts than in speech. They appear in all sorts of texts:
informational texts (words such as relative, vary, formulate, specificity, and accumulate), technical texts
(calibrate, itemize, periphery), and literary texts (misfortune, dignified, faltered, unabashedly). Tier Two
words often represent subtle or precise ways to say relatively simple things— saunter instead of walk, for
example.
• Tier Three words are specific to a domain or field of study (lava, carburetor, legislature, circumference,
aorta) and key to understanding a new concept within a text. Because of their specificity and close ties to
content knowledge, Tier Three words are far more common in informational texts than in literature.
Recognized as new and “hard” words for most readers (particularly student readers), they are often explicitly
defined by the author of a text, repeatedly used, and otherwise heavily scaffolded (e.g., made a part of a
glossary).
Practical ideas for teaching tier two words found in The Times and other texts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/learning/lesson-plans/enriching-academic-vocabulary-strategies-for-
teaching-tier-two-words-to-ell-students.html
Student-Created Word Charts