Teaching for Equity Through Language

We consider ourselves teachers of many disciplines; math, literacy, science, art, music... but have you ever considered yourself a teacher of language? Within any given content area we teach, there is an entire academic language connected to the way we learn, communicate, and share ideas effectively. We teach for equity when we provide ALL of our students access to the explicit teaching, practice, and use of this language in ways that deepen their understanding of the content and strengthen their ability to think abstractly about it. How can you become a more effective teacher of language through content and create opportunities for educational equity for ALL students?

Begin with purposefully planning out the academic language that students will need access to in order to be successful in learning the content:

1. Start with your content goal: What standard do students have to learn?

2. Now consider the academic language that students will need to explicitly learn and practice to deepen their understanding of the content.

• Think about this language at the word, phrase, and discourse levels. 
• This won’t just be a list of vocabulary words; what are some of the phrases/sentence structures students will need to talk about the content in meaningful ways? 

3. Then, think about the language functions students will need to use to process the content; are they comparing, analyzing, justifying, etc …?

4. Now think of supports that could be used to scaffold this language. Check out this link for examples of language scaffolds. 

5. Organize this information to create a language objective:

Language objectives are lesson goals that intentionally outline the academic language that students will learn and practice during the lesson. Language objectives have three parts:

• Language function: What the student does to process language through content (i.e. identify, summarize, analyze). 
• Content stem: The content grade-level curriculum standard.
• Support(s): The scaffold(s) used to make content comprehensible and accessible. 

In Jeff Zwiers’ article, Developing the Language of Thinking, he challenges teachers to become “language watchers”, by constantly noticing the cognitive language behind the standards and skills we teach. When we begin to plan and teach as “language watchers”, we begin to open the door to rigorous, grade-level content, of which ALL students deserve.

(Below are examples of language planning done by Heyer teachers; in grade level teams, they focused on using a specific content standard to plan for academic language and then created language objectives with appropriate supports.)