The Importance of Academic Vocabulary in Disciplinary Literacy

Every subject area has its own set of specialized disciplinary vocabulary words. In science, students might use terms like photosynthesis and hypothesis; in history, they discuss democracy and revolution; and in English language arts (ELA), they analyze metaphor and symbolism. These words are essential for understanding content within a specific subject. 

There are also vocabulary words that reach across subject areas, and include words like analyze, contrast, and justify. We refer to these words as academic vocabulary.

PHOTO: Show a picture of a student in middle school or older elementary grades in any classroom writing or interacting with a teacher. ALT TEXT: A student uses academic vocabulary words in a disciplinary literacy lesson.

When students receive explicit instruction in academic vocabulary, they gain the language foundation needed to access grade-level texts and better understand learning tasks. As these words become automatic, students can devote more cognitive energy to the discipline-specific terms and concepts in each subject, serving as an essential scaffold for strengthening disciplinary literacy.

In this blog, we will explore what research reveals about the role of academic vocabulary in disciplinary literacy and share practical ways teachers can select and teach high-utility words that strengthen students’ comprehension across subjects.

What Is Academic Vocabulary?

Academic vocabulary includes words that commonly appear in textbooks or other academic texts, but not as frequently in everyday conversation. These words are not tied to a single discipline or subject; instead, they are more general and can apply across many contexts. For example, the words analyze, infer, or evidence are all academic vocabulary words.

Explicit instruction in academic vocabulary can support students’ learning because it provides a language foundation for understanding texts, no matter what subject area.

DESIGN: Create a venn diagram. ALT TEXT: Venn diagram showing the difference between academic vocabulary and disciplinary vocabulary.

How Academic Vocabulary Strengthens Disciplinary Literacy

When students receive explicit instruction in academic vocabulary, they can build a foundation of language that helps them access grade-level texts. 

As these words become more automatic — both in decoding and meaning — students can shift their mental effort toward the discipline-specific terms and concepts each subject requires. In this way, academic vocabulary instruction becomes a scaffold for disciplinary literacy, allowing students to engage more deeply with the specialized knowledge in every discipline.

For example, a 5th grader encounters this question in a science lesson: Analyze the data to explain why the temperature changed.

If the student does not yet understand academic words like analyze or explain, they may struggle before they even reach the science content. But if those words are already familiar and automatic, the student can focus right away on the scientific terms (evaporation, conduction, or air pressure) that the lesson is actually about.

In this way, knowing academic vocabulary lightens the load. The student isn’t stuck trying to interpret the task; they can put their effort into understanding the science. This example aligns closely with what the research shows: when students understand general academic words, they are better positioned to focus on the discipline-specific ideas in front of them.

PHOTO: Show a picture of a student in middle school or older elementary grades in a science classroom writing or interacting with a teacher. ALT TEXT: A student uses academic vocabulary words in a science lesson.

What Does the Research Say? Academic Vocabulary as a Bridge to Disciplinary Literacy

Research shows that academic vocabulary provides the shared language students need to access disciplinary content. Nagy and Townsend (2012) describe these high-utility words as the “language of school” because they help students understand what a task requires before they even engage with the content. Classroom studies support this connection: Townsend (2014) found that when teachers scaffold academic language during instruction, students participated more fully in discipline-specific discussions and communicated their thinking with greater clarity.

Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) emphasize that each discipline has its own ways of reading, reasoning, and using language. Students who already understand general academic words such as analyze, justify, or compare can focus their effort on the specialized ideas and vocabulary that make each subject unique. 

Moje (2015) reinforces this point by noting that students must understand the academic language that frames disciplinary tasks before they can take on the deeper work of building knowledge within each field. Inquiry-based research by Spires et al. (2016) echoes this finding: students cannot fully engage in disciplinary reading, reasoning, and communication until they have a solid grasp of the academic words guiding those practices.

PHOTO: Show a picture of a student in middle school or older elementary grades in any classroom writing or interacting with a teacher. ALT TEXT: A student uses academic vocabulary words in a disciplinary literacy lesson.

Hiebert, Goodwin, and Cervetti (2017) offer an additional lens through morphology. Their study demonstrates that many academic words belong to large morphological families — predict, prediction, predictable — that recur across texts and subjects. When students understand these families and word parts, they can learn vocabulary more efficiently and reserve more cognitive energy for discipline-specific vocabulary words.

Together, this body of research shows that academic vocabulary instruction is not an add-on. It provides the foundation students need to understand tasks, engage with grade-level texts, and participate confidently in disciplinary literacy.

So how do we decide which words will make the biggest impact on students’ comprehension across content areas?

Selecting and Teaching Academic Vocabulary

To begin, teachers can take a close look at the academic words that appear frequently across content areas. High-utility terms such as analyze, interpret, justify, and determine are especially powerful because they help students make sense of tasks in any discipline.

Once teachers identify the academic words that will matter most for upcoming texts and assignments, the next step is choosing which of those words to teach explicitly and how to introduce them in ways that support all learners. This identification step is important pre-work. Teachers, or the curriculum they use, should preview upcoming texts and concepts to determine which academic words students will encounter and which of those are essential for their understanding.

A practical starting point is to look for academic words that sit at the center of multiple morphological families. Words like develop, analyze, and predict generate a range of related forms (such as development, analysis, and predictable) that appear regularly in grade-level texts. Teaching these families helps students understand how meaning carries across forms and provides a strategy for approaching unfamiliar academic words.

This approach also lays the groundwork for later disciplinary vocabulary work. Once students understand how roots, prefixes, and suffixes function in general academic words, they can apply that same knowledge to discipline-specific terms in science, social studies, and math.

It is essential that academic vocabulary be taught within the context of content-rich texts. These are the kinds of reading materials that introduce new ideas, build background knowledge, and anchor disciplinary thinking. When an academic verb such as compare, summarize, or describe appears in a text or assignment, teachers can pause to unpack its meaning through a brief model or think-aloud.

This responsive instruction helps students understand vocabulary words precisely when they need them. Revisiting the same academic word across multiple content-rich texts, discussions, and writing tasks strengthens students’ understanding and shows them how frequently these words appear in different content areas.

Additionally, posting academic words like analyze, evaluate, or explain on a word wall and pointing them out as they recur reinforces their importance and provides students with a visual reminder of the language they are expected to use. Over time, this repeated exposure solidifies students’ understanding and prepares them to take on the more specialized disciplinary language that follows.

PHOTO: Show a picture of a student in middle school or older elementary grades in any classroom writing or interacting with a teacher. ALT TEXT: A student uses academic vocabulary words in a disciplinary literacy lesson.

Supporting Multilingual Learners

Multilingual learners benefit from academic vocabulary instruction that draws on their linguistic resources and provides multiple entry points into meaning. Teachers can highlight cognates such as analyze/analizar or interpret/interpretar , compare English word parts with forms students know from their home languages, or invite students to share how a concept is expressed in another language they speak. These connections deepen conceptual understanding and affirm students’ linguistic identities.

Visuals such as sketches, icons, charts, or diagrams and simple gestures help anchor the meaning of abstract academic verbs like justify or contrast. Sentence frames and structured opportunities for talk provide multilingual learners with supportive ways to practice using academic vocabulary in speaking and writing, with scaffolds gradually removed as students gain independence. For many students, these supports make academic vocabulary more predictable and less abstract, which allows them to participate more fully in disciplinary discussions.

PHOTO: Show a picture of a student in middle school or older elementary grades in any classroom writing or interacting with a teacher. ALT TEXT: A student uses academic vocabulary words in a disciplinary literacy lesson.

Creating Meaningful Repetition and Application

All students need repeated opportunities to use academic vocabulary across different parts of a lesson and across multiple content-rich texts. A single word such as analyze should surface in a appear in teacher modeling, be highlighted during partner talk, and then be used again in student writing. Sentence frames such as I can analyze this by… or The evidence shows… give students a consistent structure for applying academic language in both speaking and writing.

As students gain confidence, teachers can fade these supports and encourage students to use academic vocabulary independently in more extended responses. This kind of intentional repetition builds automaticity. When students no longer have to puzzle over general academic words like infer , interpret , or justify , they can focus their attention on discipline-specific ideas and vocabulary.

Strengthening academic vocabulary in this way prepares students for deeper disciplinary learning, and strategies such as morphology continue to support students as they encounter more complex, field-specific terms.

Design: Recreate image below. Header should read: Access to Disciplinary Literacy ALT TEXT: Graphic showing all the academic vocabulary strategies teachers can use to help students access disciplinary literacy.

How AI Can Support Academic Vocabulary Instruction

AI language models can be useful planning partners for teachers by reducing the time it takes to prepare strong academic vocabulary instruction. Teachers can use AI to preview upcoming content-rich texts and identify which academic words students will encounter, generate student-friendly explanations, or draft sentence frames that help students practice using academic verbs in speaking and writing.

Recent work by literacy researchers, including Savvas author Freddie Hiebert, highlights the potential of AI to support vocabulary development through efficient text analysis and pattern recognition. AI tools can identify recurring morphological families, highlight high-utility words that students are likely to encounter across multiple texts, and suggest meaningful contexts for introducing those words. These capabilities can also support multilingual learners by generating visuals, cognates, or gesture suggestions that make abstract academic vocabulary more accessible.

When used thoughtfully, AI helps teachers create multimodal scaffolds and frees up planning time, while the teacher remains the expert who determines what students need and how vocabulary instruction connects to the disciplinary learning that follows.

PHOTO: Show a picture of a student in middle school or older elementary grades in any classroom writing or interacting with a teacher. ALT TEXT: A student uses academic vocabulary words in a disciplinary literacy lesson.

Academic Vocabulary as the Gateway to Disciplinary Literacy

A strong foundation in academic vocabulary gives students the language they need to understand and access disciplinary specific texts and concepts. Teaching these high-utility words within content-rich texts, and revisiting them often, helps students build the automaticity that frees them to focus on deeper learning. Thoughtful scaffolds and strategic use of AI tools can support this work. When academic vocabulary is taught purposefully and consistently, it becomes a powerful scaffold that prepares every student to engage fully in the reading, writing, and thinking of each discipline.