On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the math, social studies, and science teachers implement activities provided for them.Then, teachers highlight the target words and provide context-related definitions. On Monday, typically in the English Language Arts classroom, students and their teacher read and discuss a brief text in which the target words are embedded, and which presents arguments on both sides of a controversy or dilemma.Each week, the program activities follow this basic format: The Word Generation curriculum is made up of a 24-week sequence of topics, each associated with five all-purpose academic words. For these reasons, Word Generation focuses on all-purpose academic words and attempts to increase content area teachers’ willingness to teach them. If teachers concentrate instruction only on vocabulary terms specific to their disciplines, then the more general words may not be explicitly taught. Neither type of word tends to be used in everyday conversation, but students need to be familiar with both to read and learn effectively. While in middle school, students need to read nonfiction texts that contain many technical, discipline-specific words, but these texts also include many ‘all-purpose’ academic words, such as factor, structure, function, and interpret. Beyond teaching vocabulary, the program is designed to support students’ oral language skills, argumentation strategies, and writing skills, while also educating students about issues of current public interest. The curriculum then provides opportunities for students to use the new words in classroom discussion, debate, and writing. Word Generation introduces new words by embedding them in brief texts about controversial issues of interest to many adolescents, such as steroid use among athletes, legalization of euthanasia, and censorship of libraries and popular music. This research-based intervention focuses on “all-purpose” academic vocabulary words - words that are relevant across disciplines, but that are infrequently used in casual conversation. In response to administrators’ and teachers’ worries about the vocabulary skills of Boston Public School students, a group of researchers and educators - assembled by the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) in collaboration with the Boston Public Schools, and directed by Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Catherine Snow - designed a curriculum supplement called Word Generation, for sixth- to eighth-grade classrooms. Limited vocabulary, low reading ability, and low investment of time in reading often go hand in hand, since students usually learn more sophisticated words through reading, rather than from informal sources.1 Research shows that many adolescents in the United States struggle with reading, and one key reason is their limited vocabularies. This article originally appeared on Usable Knowledge from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Embedding new words into classroom conversations and assignments pegged to topics teens care about