This is a quasi-experimental study in which academic word-learning by students in five schools implementing the Word Generation program was compared to academic word-learning by students in three schools within the same system that did not choose to implement the program. Because the implementing schools were those that volunteered for the program, selection effects must be taken into account in interpreting the findings. The results of this initial trial of a novel approach to teaching academic language and vocabulary are promising. Students in schools implementing the program learned more of the targeted words than students in comparison schools, even though the latter group performed at a higher level at the start. Language minority students benefited more strongly than English only students, and improvement on the curriculum-specific assessment predicted performance on the state English Language Arts (ELA) assessment. Although the design of this study precludes making strong causal inferences, these preliminary results are encouraging. In particular, though the significant differences in the language demographics of different Word Generation schools makes it difficult to disentangle effect of student language status and school treatment effects, the language minority-English only (LM-EO) differences in word learning were replicated within one school. This analysis suggests that confounding effects of school-level effectiveness do not explain the faster word learning of language minority (LM) students. Instead, individuals may need to contemplate the possibility that these students were benefiting from effective, engaging, vocabulary-focused pedagogy.