Detailed Notes on Language in Science Education

Cognates and Scientific Terms

  • Website and Excel Document:
    • The website in the PowerPoint is correct for cognates and scientific terms.
    • An Excel document compares scientific terms in English with five European languages (Spanish, German, French, Italian) plus Korean, Chinese, and Farsi.
    • Users can add their own terms to a Google Doc version of the Excel document, which will populate translations in the listed languages using Google Translate.
    • Google Translate is accurate for single academic words but unreliable for sentences, paragraphs, casual English, or slang.

Newsletters from CDE

  • The Scoop:
    • An email newsletter from the Colorado Department of Education (CDE).
    • Intended for superintendents and district personnel.
    • Teachers can sign up to receive it as well.
  • The Spark:
    • A newsletter from the commissioner to teachers.
    • Sent out once or twice a month.
    • Contains information of interest to teachers.
    • The direct link to sign up is the CDE website followed by /thespark.

Cognates Examples

  • Examples of Cognates:
    • English words often have Latin roots that are cognates in Spanish.
    • Example 1: "Pound" (English) has the academic term "lb" (from Latin "Libra"), which is "Libra" in Spanish.
    • Example 2: "Body" (English) has the academic term "corpse" (from Latin), which is "cuerpo" in Spanish.
    • Example 3: "Asleep" (English) has the academic term "dormant" (from Latin), which is "dormir" in Spanish.

Deriving Nouns From Verbs

  • Cognates can help students understand academic vocabulary, especially scientific terms.
  • Examples of Deriving Nouns from Verbs:
    • English and Spanish verbs are often similar (e.g., distill/destilar, evaporate/evaporar, precipitate/precipitar).
    • English nouns ending in -tion correspond to Spanish nouns ending in -ción (e.g., distillation/destilación).

Latin Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes

  • Teaching Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes can expand students' vocabulary and help them understand scientific terms.
    • Example: Calc means stone.

Teaching Vocabulary

  • Teaching Vocabulary:
    • Teach vocabulary words in context rather than as isolated lists.
    • Integrate vocabulary throughout the unit.
    • Limit the number of words introduced at one time.
    • Review and recycle words frequently (students need many meaningful encounters with a word to own it).
    • Teach meaning of words across different content areas.
    • Use visuals (pictures, definitions, synonyms, word walls) to support vocabulary acquisition.
    • Encourage students to use personal reference tools (dictionaries).

Benefits of Teaching Vocabulary

  • Students learn content-specific and cross-content words.
  • Students make connections within and across content areas.
  • Supports visual learners.
  • Students learn to use reference tools.

Brain Research and Color Coding

  • Color-coding can help students organize information and remember content areas.
  • Example: Assign different colors to different content areas (e.g., science = green, math = blue).

Vocabulary and Literacy

  • Higher vocabulary levels correlate with better reading skills.
  • Teaching words in context is more effective than presenting lists.

Discourse Level

  • Discourse Level:
    • Focuses on language functions that require multiple sentences (e.g., comparing and contrasting, justifying, sequencing, retelling).
    • Considers the quality and quantity of language, organization, structure, cohesion, connection of ideas, explanation with details, and expression of ideas.
    • Students are scored at the word, sentence, and discourse levels on tests like the ACCESS.

Receptive and Productive Language

  • Receptive Language (Reading and Listening):
    • Students must be able to understand field notes, lab reports, arguments, research, instructions, steps in experiments, data, and observations.
  • Productive Language (Speaking and Writing):
    • Students must be able to create their own field notes, record observations, ask and answer questions, define problems, construct explanations of data, argue using evidence, explain investigations, and write reports.

Increasing Comprehension

  • Before Reading:
    • Teach discourse patterns and sentence structures.
    • Pre-teach vocabulary.
    • Have students predict the reading content.
  • During Reading:
    • Differentiate texts based on reading level using resources like News ELA, Reading A-Z, and ReadWorks.org.
    • Teach active reading strategies.
    • Use audiobooks or buddy reading.
    • Have students reflect on reading.
    • Use graphic organizers.
  • After Reading:
    • Discuss, review, present and recreate the reading.

Graphic Organizers Examples

  • Graphic Organizers Examples:
    • Response logs.
    • "Say something" starters.
    • Analysis of text structure.
    • Putting information in own words.

Productive Language and Science Standards

  • Communicating Findings:
    • Incorporate various language functions such as retelling, listing, and summarizing.
    • Example: Use evidence to develop a scientific explanation about how organisms depend on their habitat.

Building a Tower Activity

  • Discourse Practice Activity:
    • Students worked in groups to build a tower of cups using rubber bands and strings without touching the cups with their hands.
    • Recorded their conversations to self-assess using the WIDA interpretive rubric for speaking.

Mix and Match Activity

  • Mix and Match Activity:
    • Students are given cards/papers with a word, a step, or a vocabulary definition and they need to create order within the group using language.
  • Structured Discourse:
    • Use of sentence frames like "I think [word] should go after [word] because…"

Sentence Frames

  • Sentence Frames:
    • A structured opportunity for discourse.
    • Examples:
      • Ordering the steps of an experiment.
      • Ordering the shades of a word meaning.
      • Matching vocabulary to a definition, synonym, or picture.
      • Grouping aspects of an important concept.
  • Levels of Sentence Frames
    • Create different levels (ex: beginner, middle, advanced) of different levels of transition vocabularies.

Providing Discourse

  • Providing discourse on these terms:
    • Explain: process of an experiment
    • Argue: Using renewable resources.
    • Retell: natural patterns that were observed.
    • Describe: the energy transformation.
    • Compare: results
    • Contrast: a law and a theory
    • Justify: an evidence-based analysis

Teaching at the Discourse Level

  • Summary of Discourse:
    • Think about the patterns and how they occur in scientific texts.
    • Provide opportunities to have a good active read and discuss the scientific concepts.
    • The outcome if you do this the student will be able to accurately explain what they are thinking.

Academic Language: Sentence Level

  • Academic Language at the Sentence Level:
    • Focus on grammatical structures and matching language to language function.
    • Address commonly used forms like passive voice and conventions like subject-verb agreement and verb tense.
    • Promote sentence variety (avoid starting every sentence the same way) and use of transition words.

Differentiated Sentence Frames Ladder

  • Students are given a frame and have to determine what part goes after or before depending on how high of a frame they are.
  • Goal is the same throughout and it can eventually get pulled.

Prewritten Sentence Frames

*   A Gift to students that can assist in using the level of sentence frame. It may/may not work depending on the assignment you give. The teacher has the discretion to edit.

The WIDA Website

  • The WIDA website is great and has a lot to offer.
  • Teacher is going to go over where certain materials end and certain materials begin. Most do require a Weed ID but some pages aren't.
  • Can look under Grow to find PD (professional development) but it costs a lot of money to do the PD through there (the presenter suggested to do it more locally)
  • The can-do descriptor it will show you the different can-do levels.
  • The ELP standards is an example of a graphic organizer. The ELP can be pulled/used for writing samples by highlighting like we did with the recorded activity.

CDE Website

  • State wide support through CDE offices and it has a lot to offer.
  • There is the SELF standards page.
  • There is a resource page where you find materials needed.
  • The PD dates and locations will be on the site.
  • The website has different STEM resources as well like CU etc.