Academic Discourse

Students engage in academic discourse as well as advocating for his/her own needs.

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Foster Collaboration & Community

In the 21st century, all learners must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively within a community of learners. This is easier for some than others, but remains a goal for all learners. The distribution of mentoring through peers can greatly increase the opportunities for one-on-one support. When carefully structured, such peer cooperation can significantly increase the available support for sustained engagement. Flexible rather than fixed grouping allows better differentiation and multiple roles, as well as providing opportunities to learn how to work most effectively with others. Options should be provided in how learners build and utilize these important skills.

Create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities
Create school-wide programs of positive behavior support with differentiated objectives and supports
Provide prompts that guide learners in when and how to ask peers and/or teachers for help
Encourage and support opportunities for peer interactions and supports (e.g., peer-tutors)
Construct communities of learners engaged in common interests or activities
Create expectations for group work (e.g., rubrics, norms, etc.)

Quality Student to Student Interactions/Academic Discourse

Classrooms support students development of language/academic language through quality interactions

Provide opportunities for student-to-student interaction as part of daily learning
Support sustained dialogue between peers which builds on the participants’ ideas. Participants use academic language, ask questions and reason together to promote understanding of concepts
Use collaborative transfer tasks or activities which require students to solve complex problems and apply what they have learned to novel situations.

Clarify Vocabulary & Symbols

The semantic elements through which information is presented—the words, symbols, numbers, and icons—are differentially accessible to learners with varying backgrounds, languages, and lexical knowledge. To ensure accessibility for all, key vocabulary, labels, icons, and symbols should be linked to, or associated with, alternate representations of their meaning (e.g., an embedded glossary or definition, a graphic equivalent, a chart or map). Idioms, archaic expressions, culturally exclusive phrases, and slang, should be translated.

Pre-teach vocabulary and symbols, especially in ways that promote connection to the learners’ experience and prior knowledge
Provide graphic symbols with alternative text descriptions
Highlight how complex terms, expressions, or equations are composed of simpler words or symbols
Embed support for vocabulary and symbols within the text (e.g., hyperlinks or footnotes to definitions, explanations, illustrations, previous coverage, translations)
Embed support for unfamiliar references within the text (e.g., domain specific notation, lesser known properties and theorems, idioms, academic language, figurative language, mathematical language, jargon, archaic language, colloquialism, and dialect)

Clarify Syntax & Structure

Single elements of meaning (like words or numbers) can be combined to make new meanings. Those new meanings, however, depend upon understanding the rules or structures (like syntax in a sentence or the properties of equations) of how those elements are combined. When the syntax of a sentence or the structure of a graphical representation is not obvious or familiar to learners, comprehension suffers. To ensure that all learners have equal access to information, provide alternative representations that clarify, or make more explicit, the syntactic or structural relationships between elements of meaning.

Clarify unfamiliar syntax (in language or in math formulas) or underlying structure (in diagrams, graphs, illustrations, extended expositions or narratives) through alternatives that:
Highlight structural relations or make them more explicit
Make connections to previously learned structures
Make relationships between elements explicit (e.g., highlighting the transition words in an essay, links between ideas in a concept map, etc.)

Support Decoding of Text, Mathematical Notation, and Symbols

The ability to fluently decode words, numbers or symbols that have been presented in an encoded format (e.g., visual symbols for text, haptic symbols for Braille, algebraic expressions for relationships) takes practice for any learner, but some learners will reach automaticity more quickly than others. Learners need consistent and meaningful exposure to symbols so that they can comprehend and use them effectively. Lack of fluency or automaticity greatly increases the cognitive load of decoding, thereby reducing the capacity for information processing and comprehension. To ensure that all learners have equal access to knowledge, at least when the ability to decode is not the focus of instruction, it is important to provide options that reduce the barriers that decoding raises for learners who are unfamiliar or dysfluent with the symbols.

Allow the use of Text-to-Speech
Use automatic voicing with digital mathematical notation (Math ML)
Use digital text with an accompanying human voice recording (e.g., Daisy Talking Books)
Allow for flexibility and easy access to multiple representations of notation where appropriate (e.g., formulas, word problems, graphs)
Offer clarification of notation through lists of key terms