Mod 9 Discussion: Oral Language Support in My Classroom

A key principle for academic discussion I often focus on in my classroom is: pre-teaching vocabulary before the lesson. This better allows the students to comprehend the lesson, and see the vocabulary actually used in context. It also prevents a stop mid-lesson to explain what a word means and how it ties back to the entire lesson. 

This principle can easily be adapted to sentence starters.  Provide a list of vocabulary words for the students to include in their sentences that they are making using the sentence starters. This would provide both the benefits of allowing the students to utilize sentence starters and further their knowledge of the vocabulary words.