Kristen Haase, an English Language Development teacher in the School District of Lancaster, always dreamed of writing a book. She just didn’t think it would be about what she teaches every day.
“It is almost surreal,” she says of the book she recently co-authored with Dr. Carmen Rowe, a former instructional coach for SDoL English Language Development (ELD) teachers. “All the hard work, all the sacrifice.”
“Bolstering Vocabulary with Teacher Talk in the Classroom” advances the theory that students who do not speak English as their native language can more readily adapt to school if their ELD teacher uses what Haase calls “elevated language.”
“If we’re expecting students to read and write using academic language, our belief is that starts with the oral language,” she says. “We’re talking about everyday conversations and directions and just having those impromptu conversations using that elevated language.”
For example, Haase points to a phrase teachers commonly use to call elementary students to gather: “Come to the carpet.” It’s better, she believes, to use words that students are likely to encounter in academic reading: “Let’s congregate on the carpet.”
Even better, she says, is to incorporate other content-specific language: “Look at our congregation that has congregated on the rectangular carpet.” The sentence may sound awkward, but to a student just learning English, it incorporates both the noun and verb form of “congregate” and adds a mathematical term: “rectangular.”
Haase and Rowe first developed their thesis as a series of professional development sessions for teachers at Carter & MacRae Elementary School, where Haase teachers. “We felt we had enough for a book.”
The first publisher they approached turned them down, but they persevered. In December 2021, Routledge, one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM, agreed.
“It was absolutely euphoric because we had put two years of our life into this and time away from our families, and we knew our idea was right.”
The first copies of the book arrived in January 2023. She calls the book “hands-on” and “reflective” that aims to give teachers strategies they can use every day in the classroom.
The book represents “a mind shift,” Haase says. “This isn’t one more thing on a teacher’s lesson plan. This is not one more thing we’re asking teachers to do. It’s a reflective process that happens over time, and then it becomes a mindset.
“It took me years to cultivate it, but now this comes to me unconsciously when I talk to my students. I talk to them and you see them using the same language as they grow into English.”