A language dive is an instructional practice designed to deepen students’ understanding of how language works within a text. It involves taking a close look at a sentence or a short passage, examining its structure, meaning, and the way it conveys information.

Here’s a breakdown of how you can implement a language dive into your practice:

  1. Selection of Text: Choose a rich sentence or passage from a text that students are reading. The selection should be complex enough to warrant a closer examination but not so difficult that it becomes overwhelming.
  2. Deconstruction: Break the sentence down into its components. Discuss the function of each part of the sentence, such as subject, predicate, etc.
  3. Analysis of Meaning: Explore how the structure and word choices contribute to the overall meaning of the sentence. Discuss why the author might have chosen certain words or sentence structures and how these choices affect the reader’s understanding.
  4. Reconstruction: Have students put the sentence back together, applying their understanding of its components.
  5. Application: Encourage students to apply what they’ve learned from the language dive to their own writing. They can experiment with using similar sentence structures or word choices in their own work.

See this sample lesson of how a langue dive might take place in the intermediate classroom.

Language-Dive-LessonDownload

References

EL Education. (n.d.). Implementing language dives. https://eleducation.org/resources/implementing-language-dives