Sentence Frames are a great scaffold to support language development with our English Learners across all content areas. Yet, I think that sometimes we forget that they are supposed to be a temporary support for students - a scaffold is not meant to be permanent. We need to provide the scaffold for our students and provide enough opportunities to speak that our students will take ownership of the language and use it on their own without the need of the scaffold. In the content areas, we must also be purposeful about the reason for using sentence frames. Are sentence frames being used to primarily promote the student use of academic vocabulary or are sentence frames being used to help students develop their language. Yes, sentence frames can serve both purpose. In order for sentence frames to accomplish both purposes they should be differentiated based on language proficiency level. As I visit K-6 classrooms the most commons sentence frame that I see being used by teachers and students is The _______ is _______. In these classrooms the language proficiency varies greatly and the number of Beginner speakers is actually low. While it’s great that students are speaking with their peers in complete sentences and using academic vocabulary, the type of language being used is consistent K-6. John Seidlitz notes that there are different types of sentence frames with a various purposes: Cause & Effect, Compare & Contrast, Evaluation, Inference & Prediction, Classify & Organize, and Summarize & Paraphrase.
Check out how that common sentence frame The perimeter is ________. can be tweaked to support the development of language:
Sentence frames are a great tool to support student learning. Using differentiated sentence stems can help our students increase their language proficiency and content specific vocabulary too!
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There are three tiers of vocabulary. Tier 1 is “every day” words. Tier 2 is cross curricular vocabulary. Tier 3 is content specific vocabulary. Tier 2 vocabulary is sometimes seen as some of the most difficult vocabulary for students to understand and used. Tier 2 vocabulary can also be considered the “testing” vocabulary such as represent, demonstrate, describe, compare, and explain. Yet, for many English Learners these words are cognates and commonly used vocabulary in their L1. If there L1 is Spanish, these same words are representar, demostrar, describir, comparar, and explicar. Something that can be helpful to our students is to pair up Tier 2 vocabulary with its cognates and let guide them to see the connection. That way they will see that L1 can be a asset & tool that they can use to help them comrephend text they are reading in their L2. Furthermore, teachers can help them reach the conclusion that there are already words that they know, but just need a tweak in pronounciation.
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