Academic Language: A Helpful Metaphor
"Bricks, Mortar, and Buildings" is a nine-minute video that presents a metaphor for academic language by the same title (Benegas & Stolpestad, 2019). This metaphor will also be used to assist in identifying the academic language needs of your instructional sequence and learning goals. Determining the academic language demands related to the lesson objective is a very important step in planning for the success for all learners.
Function
To learn and express understanding of content, students need to be taught the purpose or function of the language for the particular lesson task. Functions of language refer to what the language is used to perform. Often the function is a part of the lesson objective. The function most often indicates the purpose of the cognitive, communicative, and/or physical action.
When you think of ‘function’, think about the verb as often the function is expressed as a verb such as critique, examine, retell argue, and categorize. Other examples of function include the following, along with their associated or related functions (Benegas & Stopelstad, 2020); Academic language function words in bold are used by the EdTPA teacher assessment system (www.edtpa.com):
Locate-- define, seek information, count, identify, indicate, match, name, point, recall, recite, repeat, reproduce, state, select, recall.
- Order—Categorize, organize, develop, discover, complete, process, outline, retell, order
- Describe— inform, explain, identify, report, retell, recount, reorder, represent, depict, paraphrase, summarize, conclude, prepare, convert, translate, generalize, extrapolate, narrate.
- Classify— arrange, organize, categorize, construct, create, generate, summarize, arrange, group
- Compare/Contrast— Describe (similarities and differences), distinguish, identify, recognize, separate, differentiate.
- Analyze— calculate, interpret, classify, categorize, predict, deduce, differentiate, examine, discriminate, distinguish, group, illustrate, infer, order, recognize, relate, transform
- Synthesize— Arrange, categorize, combine, compile, compose, construct, create, deduce, explain, formulate, generalize, generate, integrate, modify, organize, prepare, plan, produce, propose, rearrange, reconstruct, relate, reorganize, revise, solve, summarize.
- Justify— argue, persuade, discriminate, prove, deduce, document, support, question, validate, verify, debate, construct, persuade
- Infer-- predict, hypothesize, extrapolate, restate, summarize, reconstruct, synthesize, derive, deduce, explain, create, construct
- Evaluate- argue, appraise, assess, compare, conclude, consider, contrast, criticize, critique, decide, describe, determine, discriminate, grade, judge, justify, recommend, validate, verify, test, support, rate, rank, measure, interpret, relate, identify, explain, indicate, confirm.