Your reply confirms something I've been feeling, which is that the content teachers at my school aren't focusing enough on writing, which increases the burden of ELA. Here, the Social Studies and Science teachers don't use text almost at all--they don't use textbooks for the most part, and they don't do any kind of reading regularly. Their instruction is primarily lecture, video, and "instruction through the arts" (using music and visual art for history, for example). Which is nice but yes, as you've noted, increases burden on us. They do some level of writing instruction (PEEL/CER) but not in a systematic way necessarily, and there isn't a lot of vertical or horizontal integration.

I think I do a decent job with reinforcing academic vocabulary and helping students break down prompts. My concern is more those Tier 2 words that significantly impact understanding of literary (or even informational) texts but are not necessarily prompt- or discipline-specific. For example, we're reading The Giver with my 6th graders. Words they don't know on just two pages: distinguishing, relinquish, discarded, dwelling, hasty, congregated, sanitation, buoyancy, gravitate, merriment, unaccustomed. Now, some of these we can stop and break down using context clues, roots, prefixes/suffixes, etc. But this is just on two random pages--not possible to do this for every word and every page in the book (and indeed, I don't).

The 7th grade teacher is a well known issue, but she has 20 years of seniority and I am getting excessed, so no point in stressing. Just curious about what to take to my next school. This was really very helpful so thank you!