ESL Tier 2 Academic Vocabulary Daily Warm-Ups | Yearlong Bundle

Wondering how to teach academic vocabulary to your ESL students? This resource provides an engaging daily warm-up activity to help English Learners learn Tier 2 vocabulary words.

How does it work?

As part of a 10-15-minute routine, students answer a daily high-interest question using an academic vocabulary word. They spend a full two weeks studying each word, giving them the practice they need to understand how the word is used in various contexts.

Each day, students respond to the question orally with a partner and in their response packets, emphasizing speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. Visuals help students understand the meaning of each question, and sentence frames structure their responses. There are nine question slides per word and a quiz for the tenth day.

This bundle covers the following 20 vocabulary words:

UNIT 1: cause, increase, prefer, differ, avoid

UNIT 2: recommend, decrease, include, similar, effect

UNIT 3: addition, defend, except, result, frequent

UNIT 4: develop, entire, effective, essential, typical

Each unit includes

• Slide decks: 9 questions for each word
• Student response pages
• Quizzes and scoring rubric
• Teacher guide with tips for using this resource

Why Tier 2 Academic Vocabulary?

Tier 2 vocabulary words are non-subject-specific academic terms like reason, identify, or effective. These are high-utility words for ELLs to learn because they 1.) are abstract and require some practice to fully understand (unlike Tier 1 conversational words such as dog, tree, or school) and 2.) are used frequently in all subjects (unlike Tier 3 subject-specific academic words like photosynthesis, hyperbole, and numerator).

Have you ever taught an English Learner who developed conversational English quickly but plateaued at an intermediate level? Often the problem is a lack of academic vocabulary, which leads to difficulty with grade-level reading and writing.

Why teach vocabulary this way?

In order to internalize the meaning of a new word and add it to their own vocabularies, ELLs need lots of practice using the word in a variety of contexts. Answering high-interest questions forces students to actually USE the target words rather than simply memorize definitions. Studying a single word over the course of 10 days allows students to see the word used in multiple ways, helping them more fully understand its meaning. If they don't completely get it on the first day, they have nine more days to practice!

Here's more ESL resources you might like:

• Differentiated Reading Comprehension Passages for ESL
• Mentor Sentences for ESL
• 10-Minute Grammar Mini-Lessons
• ESL Writing Paragraph Frames
• ESL Novel Studies
• SLIFE Decodable Phonics Readers

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