RESOURCES

Often times, teachers will limit their use of academic terms in instruction because they believe the language is too abstract for ELs. Many academic terms (usually tasks we ask students to perform across all content areas such as summarize, identify) are actually cognates in Spanish, meaning they are almost the same word in both languages. Though they seem abstract in English, they tend to be used in social, common, settings in Spanish. It is vital to an EL’s academic success to have repeated exposure to academic terms. A visual can help connect concrete to abstract.