“School-based Interventions for Multilingual Adolescents to Promote Academic Word Knowledge and Promote Metalinguistic Awareness”

In this presentation, Amy Crosson will share two examples of my school-based intervention research with multilingual adolescents, carried out in collaboration with English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers in urban, public school districts. Both studies, funded by Institute for Education Sciences, focus on developing instructional interventions to promote academic word learning and metalinguistic awareness.

First, she will present the study of English Learners’ Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters (EL RAVE), an intervention in which students learn to analyze academic word meanings (e.g., verify, aver) by exploring connections to Latin-based bound roots (e.g., ver ~ “truth”) and leveraging cross-linguistic connections between these roots and Spanish (e.g., verdad = “true”). Employing a quasi-experimental design and adjusting for clustering of students (n = 100 intervention, 92 business-as-usual) within classrooms, we estimated main treatment effects and then examined interactions between intervention and home language on six literacy outcomes: root meanings, word meanings, orthographic processing, multidimensional vocabulary knowledge, morphological analysis, and reading comprehension. Participants were middle school students in grades 6–8, comprising 67 percent Spanish L1 and 33 percent “other L1” speakers who were speakers of 23 different home languages. Significant and practically meaningful results were found for five of the six outcomes. Results indicated that Spanish L1 students responded more positively to the intervention for development of accurate and deep representations of word and root meanings. At the same time, results underscore the value of the intervention for multilingual learners of other language backgrounds.

Second, she will present initial findings from the Words as Tools study, which builds on the previous intervention study but focuses on academic words that are high utility for learning in science classes. This intervention, still under development, also infuses morphology into learning science words, and features polysemy exploration. Initial results show some evidence of promise of the intervention for multilingual adolescents.