Helping ELLs Meet Standards in English Language Arts and Science: An Intervention Focused on Academic Vocabulary

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards require students to understand and produce academic language that appears in informational text. Vocabulary is a critical domain of academic language, but English language learners (ELLs) come to the English Language Arts classroom with more limited English vocabulary than their English-proficient peers. This study compared 2 methods of vocabulary instruction: extended vocabulary instruction and embedded vocabulary instruction. Teachers implemented both approaches in the context of interactive shared reading, in which teachers and students read and discussed informational text. A total of 30 teachers in 18 schools and 509 third- and fourth-grade Spanish-speaking ELLs in a large, high-poverty district in the southwestern United States participated. Findings indicate that although extended instruction was the more effective approach, embedded instruction also helped ELLs acquire general academic and domain-specific vocabulary—an important finding, given that embedded instruction requires considerably less instructional time.