While we meticulously map out and prepare for the activities we engage our students in, the specific linguistic structures and vocabulary we employ often remains implicit, almost accidental. This raises critical questions: which aspects of our classroom talk truly accelerate literacy – is it sheer volume, vocabulary precision, or syntactic complexity? And how can we become more deliberate and intentional architects of this vital linguistic environment for all students, including those developing multi-dialectalism and multilingualism?

My recent presentation at ResearchED in NYC ventured into this territory, examining the research on how the linguistic environment we curate can influence student literacy achievement.

The Power of Classroom Talk: More Than Just Words

Why this focus on classroom talk? Because literacy isn't built in a vacuum. While foundational skills like decoding and spelling are absolutely critical (and have for all too long been sidelined), the elementary ELA block at large all too often focuses on isolated skills.

Despite elementary schools in the U.S. dedicating significantly more time to ELA than any other subject, reading scores (like those from state ELA tests or the more nationally normed NAEP) often remain stubbornly flat, including here in NYC. This prompts a crucial question: is simply adding more ELA time the answer, or do we need to rethink how we build literacy—both within and beyond ELA?

This is where focusing on content-rich talk across the content areas becomes vital. Subjects like social studies, science, math, and the arts offer fertile ground for developing the academic language and background knowledge that underpin strong literacy. In fact, some research suggests this cross-curricular approach may be more effective for reading comprehension than simply adding more ELA time. For example, a 2020 study by the Fordham Institute found that increased instructional time in social studies—but not additional time in ELA—was associated with improved reading comprehension for elementary students (Tyner & Kabourek, 2020). Notably, the students who benefited most from additional social studies time included girls and those from lower-income and non-English-speaking homes. Tackling the challenge of building a strong foundation begins, fundamentally, with the language we choose to use and explicitly teach across all subjects.

Yet social studies—and other content areas—occupy an increasingly small portion of an elementary student’s learning (more recent RAND paper on this).

The Problem We Face

This focus is critical because many students, particularly in the K-5 grades, can encounter significant hurdles in developing robust literacy and language skills that are essential for academic success. These challenges can be particularly acute for multiidialectal or multilingual learners navigating academic language demands alongside or in addition to their home language(s). Key challenges include:

• Foundational Skills Gaps: Some students do not receive the focused instruction and practice they need in decoding and spelling to become fluent readers and writers.
• Knowledge and Language Gaps: Many students lack consistent and cohesive opportunities to build the background knowledge and language necessary to understand complex topics across different subjects, while building on and connecting to the cultures, schema, and languages they bring.
• Complex Language Exposure: The majority of students need more exposure to, and structured practice with, reading, writing, and talking using the complex language inherent in disciplinary discourse and texts.

What the Research Says: Listening In on Learning

I used the wonderful study by Jeanne Wanzek, Carla Wood, and Christopher Schatschneider, which I have highlighted in this blog before as the anchor for my presentation. Using LENA devices to record classroom instruction, they found:

• Teachers, on average, used relatively few academic or curriculum-specific vocabulary words.
• Crucially, teachers who did use more academic words had students demonstrating higher vocabulary achievement by the end of the school year. This held true even when controlling for the teachers' overall expressive vocabulary and across students with varying incoming abilities.
  • The takeaway: The specific words we choose during instruction have a measurable link to student vocabulary growth, a crucial component of academic success for all learners.

Correlation or Causation? Towards Stronger Links

Correlation, of course, isn't causation. Does using more academic language cause better outcomes, or do teachers with higher-achieving students simply use more academic language? While the Wanzek et al. study is correlational, a growing body of research points towards a causal link between targeted language exposure/instruction and improved outcomes. Here’s just a smattering:

• Conversational Turns: Interventions increasing parent-child conversational turns led to language skill improvements and predicted neurocognitive changes (Romeo et al., 2021).
• Mathematical Language: An RCT using dialogic reading to boost mathematical language positively impacted preschoolers' general math skills (Purpura et al., 2017).
• Classroom Math Talk: Teachers using more mathematical language were found to be more effective at raising student test scores in upper elementary grades (Himmelsbach et al., 2024).
• Content Literacy: A sustained literacy intervention grounded in science and social studies content led to lasting improvements in vocabulary, reading comprehension (across domains), and even math, demonstrating far transfer effects (Kim et al., 2024).
  • The takeaway: The pattern across these studies strongly suggests that actively improving the language environment through intentional instruction yields real results in student learning, with content-rich instruction showing particular promise for multilingual learners

Defining and Developing Academic Language

So, what is this “academic language” we're aiming for? It's the formal, complex, often abstract and decontextualized language common in school, texts, and professional settings (NYSED, Lesaux & Philips Galloway; Philips Galloway et al., 2019). Since this language isn't always prevalent outside school, the classroom becomes the primary place many students will learn it, making our role crucial, especially in fostering academic language development for multilingual learners.

Understanding how language typically develops—and recognizing that multilingual development adds further layers of complexity and potential cognitive benefits—helps us see where to intervene and build bridges for students:

1. Contextualized Interaction: Early conversational turns, rooted in the immediate environment.
2. Oral Storytelling: Moves towards abstraction, requiring inference and schema-building beyond the 'here and now'.
3. Shared Reading: Introduces more decontextualized language—denser vocabulary, complex sentences, formal structures typical of written text (I’ve rounded up a list of studies related to this).
4. Written Language: Characterized by rarer, more abstract words, complex syntax (like nominalizations, passive voice, relative clauses), and formal discourse structures

Our instruction aims to help students navigate this journey towards greater precision and abstraction. Leveraging students' home languages can serve as a powerful bridge along this continuum.

Explicit Teaching Meets Implicit Learning: Achieving “Escape Velocity”

So, how do we teach this complex language effectively?

While explicit teaching of vocabulary or grammar acts as a necessary accelerator, it works best when launching students into an environment rich with coherent and cohesive implicit learning opportunities. This explicit scaffolding is vital for all learners navigating complex academic language, and particularly crucial for multidialectal and multilingual students acquiring these structures in the more formal English used in school. Mark Seidenberg calls this synergy achieving “escape velocity”—where explicit instruction scaffolds and enables students to learn powerfully from the sheer volume of language they encounter through reading, writing, and discussion. Our goal is to engineer this velocity for all learners.

As we’ve also explored on this blog, part of building this velocity is about providing our kids with more texts and more talk—”textual feasts,” as Dr. Tatum calls it.

Putting Research into Practice: Classroom Strategies

How can we intentionally weave denser and more complex academic language into our daily practice, while valuing and leveraging the linguistic diversity of our students? It involves concrete, planned actions:

1. Plan to Amplify Knowledge & Language:

   • Identify core concepts in a unit/text.
   • Pinpoint the essential academic vocabulary used to explain these concepts.
   • Explore morphology and etymology (e.g., using tools like Etymonline) to deepen understanding, including potential cross-linguistic connections.
   • Analyze how these words function in different sentences and contexts.
   • Plan structured opportunities for students to practice reading, writing, and speaking with these words.

2. Leverage Multimodal Text Sets: Immerse students in a topic through various texts (articles, books, videos, images) and modalities. This creates multiple, varied exposures to related concepts and vocabulary.

3. Structured Supplements for Read-Alouds: Don't just read; enhance read-alouds by providing concise definitions, examples, asking stimulating questions that require using target vocabulary, connecting to prior knowledge, and using concept maps (Mosher & Kim,, 2025). Consider incorporating home language previews or connections where appropriate.

1. Explicitly Teach Morphology & Leverage Cross-Linguistic Connections: Build awareness of word parts (prefixes, suffixes, roots) and connections between words across languages. This is especially powerful for multilingual learners; recognizing shared roots and patterns (like transparent/transparente) and using contrastive analysis between languages (like comparing verb forms) can unlock meaning and build metalinguistic awareness. Use a consistent multisyllabic word decoding strategy. Use tools like concept/semantic maps to help visualize connections, including across languages.

1. Structure Reading Instruction (Before, During, After): Be intentional about the purpose of each read:
   • Before: Build background, preview text and vocabulary. Activate or build relevant background knowledge, connecting to diverse student experiences.
   • During (1st Read): Focus on flow and gist, model fluency, check basic comprehension.
   • During (2nd Read): Zoom in on specific words, sentences, author's craft. Practice paraphrasing key details.
   • During (3rd Read): Analyze structure and language more deeply. Ask inferential questions.
   • After: Review, engage with target vocabulary/language, summarize, practice speaking/writing using mentor sentences and target words.
2. Zoom In and Amplify: When revisiting texts, strategically select specific words or sentences to focus on. Use routines (echo/choral reading, dictation, sentence combining, contrastive analysis) to deepen understanding and usage. (See the Zoom In and Amplify Menu resource for ideas).

These routines can often be adapted using contrastive analysis or strategic invitations to use and connect to home language for multilingual learners.

Moving Forward: The Bottom Line

The research is increasingly clear: the language we choose to use and teach matters. By consciously choosing to immerse students in rich, academic language within and across content areas, providing both explicit instruction and ample opportunities for implicit learning through meaningful interaction with texts and topics, we can significantly enhance language development and overall literacy achievement, creating more equitable opportunities for all students, including multidialectal and multilingual learners. It requires intentional planning and a shift towards seeing every teacher as a teacher of language, but the potential payoff for our students is enormous.

To effectively address the challenges and leverage the power of classroom talk, the evidence points towards these key actions:

• Recognize the crucial role academic language plays in student literacy development across all subjects, recognizing its importance most especially for students developing multilingualism
• Understand the interplay between explicit language instruction (the accelerator) and the implicit learning that occurs through rich language exposure (the fuel).
• Actively implement strategies to intentionally increase the quantity and quality of academic language used in classroom instruction and student interactions daily, leveraging students' diverse linguistic resources as assets.

#literacy #education #research #AcademicLanguage #TeacherTalk #ReadingComprehension #Vocabulary #Instruction #ResearchED #MultilingualLearners #ENL #Biliteracy

Teacher Vocabulary Use and Student Language and Literacy Achievement

• Citation: Wanzek, J., Wood, C., & Schatschneider, C. (2023). Teacher Vocabulary Use and Student Language and Literacy Achievement. Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 66(9), 3574–3587. https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00605

The Power of Teacher Talk

We know that the explicit teaching of unfamiliar words that students will encounter in written text is important. But what about the language that is used by teachers throughout the school day? What implicit learning opportunities are constrained or afforded through the model of the language that a teacher uses while teaching, and what are the impacts on student learning? The importance of indirect or incidental language experiences in a classroom is emphasized in this study. And this and other research reviewed in the paper suggests that enriching linguistic environments are particularly beneficial for young readers or those who struggle with reading.

We’ve explored previously the importance not simply of “rich language” use (what does that even mean?) but of exposure to and use of a very particular kind of language: decontextualized language. This is the language of narrative, of conversational turn-taking and discussion around ideas and things, the more abstract language of written text. The content, form, and use of such language takes us beyond that of the immediate moment, beyond our own already delimited feelings and experiences, and into a realm of interpersonal and cultural thought, knowledge, and perspectives.

We can engage our children with this decontextualized language even before they leave the womb. They hear us tell stories and sing and begin to attune to our rhythms. Then when we can hold them in our arms, in our wraps, in our laps, we respond encouragingly to their babbling to tell them about the world, and we read picture books to them, showing them beautiful artwork that brings words alive. In classrooms, we read to our children with greater intention and a systematic approach, teaching them ideas and words before, during and after our carefully chosen texts, we instruct them in how to write what they can see or hear, and kids begin to automate the regular and irregular algorithms that sort letter-sounds and concepts into words.

Indirect or incidental language experiences can provide students with exposure to and use of new vocabulary and grammatical structures. When teachers use a variety of forms of language in their speech, they can provide students with opportunities to hear and learn new kinds of language, new kinds of ideas, and new kinds of feelings and viewpoints. Teacher talk can provide students with models in how to use these different types of language. When teachers use clear and concise language, they show students how to communicate more precisely and efficiently. When teachers give students opportunities to respond to questions or to participate in discussions around shared texts, topics, and themes, they provide students with opportunities to practice using that language to demonstrate and deepen their understanding of that new knowledge.

The Research Paper

This study focused on second-grade classrooms. To gather the language data, the 2nd grade teachers wore a “language environment analysis (LENA) digital language processor to record a full day of instruction twice per month throughout the school year. The researchers then analyzed segments of the language they used directed to students using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) transcriptions.

The study revealed something incredibly important: teachers who used more academic words had their students achieve higher vocabulary levels by the end of the year.

Yet use of academic words was extremely uncommon in this sample of 64 teachers and 619 students, despite having a curriculum that included specific grade-level academic words: “On average, teachers used common words, with 87% of the words used by teachers on the list of the 1,000 most frequently used words in the English language. Academic words were used only 1% of the instructional time on average, suggesting very little input for students for these more school-based words.”

The researchers furthermore found that it's not just about the quantity of words but the quality and relevance to the subject matter being taught. Importantly, they found that the “academic word use by teachers continued to predict student vocabulary outcomes even once teachers’ expressive vocabulary was considered. In other words, the relationship is not explained by some students having teachers with a higher overall vocabulary. All teachers who used more academic words in their instruction and discussion had students with higher vocabulary at the end of the school year. Second, the relationship was not different for students of varying incoming vocabulary abilities.”

This is therefore a potentially high impact influence on learning for the kids who need it the most.

What was also interesting was that they found that ELA and math were regularly taught, usually daily, while science and social studies were taught significantly less across all the schools. “Thus, students received language input largely through ELA and math instruction during an average school day.” In this study, the teachers used a variety of ELA curricula (Wonders, Journeys, and others), some of which are not systematic in how they approach building knowledge and language.

Why I think this study is important

While not expanded upon in this paper, the lack of more content and disciplinary focused instruction across a week clearly bears implications for their finding on the lack of academic words that students were exposed to at large. There was a paper a while back that this reminds me of, a 2020 analysis from Fordham Institute, in which they found, counterituitively, that “Increased instructional time in social studies—but not in ELA—is associated with improved reading ability.”

We may thus be going astray if we’re merely expanding or reworking literacy blocks without simultaneously boosting up the academic knowledge and language that students gain from discipline specific study and the reading, writing, and talking around strategically selected texts that build cumulative and coherent bodies of knowledge.

Furthermore, this study also found that the proportion of less common words used was highest in math classes. This suggests that math could be an unexpected hotspot for academic vocabulary and language development – which makes sense when you think about it. The language needed for mathematical thinking and discourse is precise and specific to the discipline. And yet the opportunity to explicitly teach language and literacy through math is not often fully leveraged.

I should be clear that this study (and the authors make this clear) is correlational, not causational, and “does not suggest that filling instruction with academic words would mean even higher vocabulary achievement.” Another limitation of the data in this study is that it “did not allow for consideration of students' utterances or conversational exchanges between a variety of communication partners which could also be of interest in a future study.”

And that in fact connects to the findings of our last research highlight, which was on the importance of automatization in learning a new language. The more that children can hear, see, speak, and write the new words and ideas they are learning, the more those words and ideas will stick.

All in all – this is the kind of research that I think every teacher should be aware of. Every word we use in our speech (or signing), and every word we put before them in the texts we select can inhibit or expand what our kids can learn. Discuss... #literacy #language #research #vocabulary #automatization #implicit #explicit

Individual differences in L2 listening proficiency revisited: Roles of form, meaning, and use aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge

• Citation: Saito, K., Uchihara, T., Takizawa, K., & Suzukida, Y. (2023). Individual differences in L2 listening proficiency revisited: Roles of form, meaning, and use aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1-27. doi:10.1017/S027226312300044X

This paper explores how various aspects of phonological vocabulary knowledge affect second language (L2) listening proficiency. The study involved 126 Japanese learners of English.

Back in 1978, Bloom & Lahey presented a simple and useful model of language: form, meaning, and use.

The authors of this paper argue that the development of listening proficiency in a new language is based on phonological vocabulary knowledge, which comprises three different stages—phonologization, generalization, and automatization. According to the authors, “phonologization and generalization are connected to the form-meaning aspect of vocabulary knowledge, whereas automatization corresponds to the use-in-context aspect.”

This paper examines gaining vocabulary knowledge through the specific aspects of:

1. Phonologization: Recognizing words aurally without orthographic cues.
2. Generalization: Recognizing words regardless of the speaker.
3. Automatization: Quickly determining the semantic and collocational appropriateness of words in various contexts.

The interesting finding here (to me) was how important automatizing vocabulary knowledge was to enhancing listening proficiency in a new language. This suggests that teachers should not only focus on word recognition but also on the ability to use vocabulary in varying contexts and with different speakers.

I think this is important because while the message that teaching vocabulary is important has broadly made its way to the field, I think the message that it needs to be not merely taught, but seen, heard, and read in varying contexts – and most importantly, actively used by students in varying contexts. Within a lesson, this means drawing attention to and using key vocabulary before, during, and after reading a core text, and this is a great place to start. But clearly, one lesson won’t be enough. That key vocabulary then needs to be spaced and interwoven in practice and use throughout the remainder of the unit of study! Some of this may be explicit, especially when first introducing words, but much can also be implicit if the vocabulary is aligned to and key to understanding the topic that all the content, texts, and discussions are oriented around.

The more that students can hear, see (the word in print), speak, and write those key words, they more that they will stick!

#literacy #multilingualism #vocabulary #automatization #research