The Effects of ELL Instructional Strategies on Low Socioeconomic Students' Acquisition of Semantic and Sentence Syntax in Academic Vocabulary

The achievement gap is ever growing in the United States educational system. Low socioeconomic students is one demographic group who is targeted for educators to evaluate teaching and learning. Academic vocabulary is a targeted piece of language that is integrated into all content areas in school that makes content comprehensible. Low socioeconomic students begin schools with simplistic language and often dew personal experiences. Therefore, focusing on low socioeconomic students' vocabulary acquisition and language development could improve their academic success for the future. ELL instructional methods such as the SIOP model scaffolds students learning while embedding language structures to support academic vocabulary acquisition.This quantitative study analyzed the effects of general education teachers' implementation of Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) ELL instructional strategies and low socioeconomic students' development of lexical semantics and syntactic relationships with academic vocabulary words. The research design was experimental in nature while using retrospective data. In this study, participants of the 3-5th grade students were in experimental and control groups. The experimental variable in this study was ELL instructional strategies of the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Operation Protocol) model. Student data was collected in the form of a unit vocabulary assessment by all groups of participants. A t-test was used to analyze statistical data to determine the significance of ELL instructional strategies among students' acquisition of lexical semantic and sentence syntax in academic vocabulary. The study provided further research and future implications that could lead educational leaders to evaluate ELL effective teaching strategies to provide linguistic support for low socioeconomic students in vocabulary.