Attending to Precision: Vocabulary Support in Middle School Mathematics Classrooms

Mastery of language is critical to the mastery of content in middle school content area classrooms. In order to comprehend the disciplinary-specific texts that they encounter in their social studies, language arts, science, and mathematics classrooms, students must be literate in the content area vocabulary that is specific to those disciplines. Otherwise, specialized content area language may pose a barrier to student comprehension of content. Therefore, middle school teachers hold the dual responsibility of not only teaching their content but thoughtfully engaging their students with content area language during instruction. In this descriptive observational study, we explore the language support and focus in 1 middle school's mathematics classrooms. We observed a total of 4 teachers and classrooms over a month-and-a-half time period.