As we continue to have discussions with teachers and English B students about local and global literacy, the language continuum, and the need to use a range of registers, we feel the need to have some strategies in place to enable English B students to produce the kind of writing required by any particular text type in any particular course. To help enable your students to produce this kind of writing, it is a good idea to start at the sentence level (you may have already started on the word level with specialized vocabulary or Tier 2/3 words).
Below are four command words and suggestions on how to make academically appropriate sentences that express the requirements of the command terms. Teachers can use them as samples, or make their own based on the specific command terms of their subject.
INTERPRET
One way to interpret these terms is __________.
The concept of __________ teaches us that __________.
I infer that the meaning of __________ is __________, because __________.
What these terms mean is __________, and this applies to __________, because __________.
ANALYSE
The relationship between ________ and __________ is __________.
When we break these terms down into the components of __________, we can see that __________.
After careful examination of __________, it appears that __________.
The terms are related in the following ways: __________.
COMPARE / CONTRAST
Notice how the two are similar in that __________ and yet are different in that __________.
At first glance, __________ and __________ may seem similar; however, __________.
On the one hand, we have __________; on the other hand, we have __________.
In the case of __________, we could argue that __________.
SYTHESIZE
The main points made are: __________.
The concepts of __________ can be expressed as __________.
On the whole, these concepts __________.
Our synthesis of __________ and __________ is __________.
There are dozens of command terms in each subject. It is a good idea to make sure that students understand them through use, discussion and modelling (as above). Modelling sentences makes those command terms and the ideas attached to them more accessible to second language students. As a department it can be very useful to spend time writing model sentences for the command terms in your courses to be shared and displayed.