Struggling to Understand the Assignment
By upper elementary and middle school, we expect children to know what it means to define, describe, explain, compare, identify, infer, analyze, and justify—often without ever explicitly teaching those words.
Today, a student asked me a simple question:
“What does define mean?”
We weren't working on a reading worksheet. We weren't doing a language lesson.
We were reviewing instructions for a science assignment that asked the student to identify and explain vocabulary terms.
And this is exactly why academic language matters.
By upper elementary and middle school, children are expected to understand words like:
define
identify
describe
explain
compare
infer
analyze
justify
These words often appear in directions across every subject—but they aren't necessarily words children automatically understand just because they can read them.
A student may know the science term they're being asked about and still struggle to complete the assignment because they don't understand what the question is asking them to do.
That's a language problem hiding inside an academic task.
Explicitly teaching academic language means slowing down long enough to make the expectations visible:
Define → tell what something means
Describe → tell what something is like
Compare → tell how two things are alike and/or different
Explain → tell how or why something happens
And this work becomes increasingly important as children move through upper elementary and middle school, when the language of instruction becomes more complex and abstract.
Sometimes the child doesn't need to “try harder.”
They need someone to explicitly teach the language of the assignment before expecting them to demonstrate what they know.
Academic success depends on more than knowing the content. Children also need the language to show what they know.