Functional Language

English Learner students have two jobs in your class. First of all, they need to learn your content. Simultaneously, they also need to acquire the language and vocabulary needed to express their thoughts, ideas, and new content knowledge. We can't expect students to be able to delve deeper into the content, as is expected in the Common Core State Standards, until they can access the content at this most basic level.

How are you helping make your content more accessible through language supports?

One strategy for making content more accessible is by offering the functional language students need in order to process your content, through sentence frames.

Here's an example from EL Achieve's Student Flipbook. The flipbooks have language frames for Cause and Effect, Compare and Contrast, Explain and Describe, Proposition and Support, and for Sequence.

This is portable, generic academic language that can be used for all content areas. By providing and using supports like this in your content area class, students will gain practice with high leverage, functional language that can be used across the content areas. Providing these frames can help students to clearly express their ideas, both in written form, but perhaps even more importantly for ELs, orally!

There are many places in your lesson plan that these frames can come in handy. Information can be presented through the use of the frames. The teacher can model the frame in use.

Students can use the frames during oral language practice and structured peer interactions. Increased student talk time should be a goal for all teachers while transitioning to Common Core.

Sentence frames can be used to facilitate note taking and interactive reading. They can be used to help with comprehension of complex texts. They can be scaffolded to gradually increase student independence.

They can be used extensively when creating academic writing supports for students. You can create genre-specific writing templates to assist students in writing in the language of your discipline with confidence and support.

Can you think of other ways that functional language sentence frames can assist you in the classroom? Share in the comments!