Academic Language Mastery: Grammar and Syntax in Context, David E. Freeman

By now it’s a given: if we’re to help our ELLs and SELs access the rigorous demands of today’s content standards, we must cultivate the “code” that drives school success: academic language. Look no further for assistance than this much-anticipated series from Ivannia Soto, in which she invites field authorities Jeff Zwiers, David and Yvonne Freeman, Margarita Calderon, and Noma LeMoine to share every teacher’s need-to-know strategies on the four essential components of academic language.

The subject of this volume is grammar and syntax. Here, David and Yvonne Freeman shatter the myth that academic language is all about vocabulary, revealing how grammar and syntax inform our students’ grasp of challenging text. With this book as your roadmap, you’ll learn how to:

Teach grammar in the context of students’ speech and writing
Use strategies such as sentence frames, passives, combining simple sentences into more complex sentences, and nominalization to create more complex noun phrases
Assess academic language development through a four-step process
Look inside and discover the tools you need to help students master more sophisticated and complex grammatical and syntactical structures right away. Better yet, read all four volumes in the series and put in place a start-to-finish instructional plan for closing the achievement gap.