Think Like a Linguist with Dr. Amy Crosson In today’s episode, host Matt Sroka welcomes Dr. Amy Crosson for an in-depth conversation on vocabulary instruction for multilingual students. They explore her research on academic vocabulary and word analysis through Latin roots, highlighting strategies that empower students to draw on their linguistic knowledge. This episode provides valuable insights into how teachers can harness students' diverse language backgrounds to deepen their understanding and appreciation of words.The discussion centers on the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy article, “Think Like a Linguist: Leveraging Multilingual Students’ Expertise about Language”.Amy Crosson is an associate professor at Penn State’s College of Education and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Language Science at Penn State. She started her career teaching English as a Second language in a middle school in rural Guatemala and then as a bilingual Spanish-English kindergarten teacher in urban school districts in Massachusetts.Amy’s research focuses on developing and evaluating instructional programs that are designed to improve and accelerate learning for multilingual learners in public school settings. Her work has focused on supporting multilingual learners (1) to sharpen their metalinguistic and language awareness, (2) to utilize their metalingual resources; (3) to engage in oral and written argumentation; and (4) to read with understanding.In addition to the JAAL article on “Think Like a Linguist”, she and her colleagues recently published an article on the instructional program-- English Learners’ Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters (EL RAVE)-- that gave rise to Think Like a Linguist. That article addresses the effects of Think Like a Linguist and the overall EL RAVE instructional program on multilingual adolescents’ language and reading outcomes. You can read about that in the journal, Scientific Studies of Reading (2025).Article: “Think Like a Linguist: Leveraging Multilingual Students’ Expertise about Language”Other Related Resources:EL RAVE Website: https://sites.psu.edu/elrave/Words as Tools: https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/awards/words-tools-vocabulary-development-emergent-bilinguals-science-and-beyond?ID=5857Carlson, M. & Crosson. (2025). The synchronic status of historical bound roots in the mental   lexicon: A dynamic, psychocentric perspective.  The Mental  Lexicon. Crosson, A.C., Kieffer, M.J., McKeown, M.G., & Nagy, W. (2025). Cross-language   morphological analysis improves academic word learning for multilingual  adolescents. Scientific Studies of Reading [Special issue on the science of teaching   reading.] 10.1080/10888438.2024.2415916 Crosson, A.C. & Silverman, R.D. (2022). Impact of COVID‐19 on early literacy instruction for emergent bilinguals, Reading Research Quarterly, 57. 5-14. 10.1002/rrq.456 Crosson, A.C., McKeown, M.G., Lei, P., Zhao, H.*, Li, X.*, Patrick, K. & Brown, K. & Shen,   Y.* (2021). Morphological analysis skill and vocabulary knowledge are malleable through intervention and may contribute to reading comprehension for multilingual adolescents.  Journal of Research in Reading, 44, 154-174. 10.1111/1467-9817.12323 {Winner of the 2022 United Kingdom Literacy Association/Wiley Research in Literacy Education Award]Crosson, A.C., McKeown, M.G., Robbins, K. & Brown, K. (2019). Key elements of robust vocabulary instruction for emergent bilingual adolescents.  Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 50, 493-505. 10.1044/2019_LSHSS-VOIA-18-0127Crosson, A.C., McKeown, M.G., Moore, D.W. & Ye, F. (2019). Extending the bounds of morphology instruction: Teaching Latin roots facilitates academic word learning for English learner adolescents. Reading and Writing, 32, 689–727. 10.1007/s11145-018-9885-y 

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