So one of my favorite activities for getting students to use academic language is summarization. In summarization, what students do is they read a very short passage and they summarize it orally to a friend.
Now, this may seem boring to you or me. But it's a real challenge for a non-native speaker. What they do is they appropriate the author's language into their own. And they begin to acquire the language. Or they can change partners several times. And you can…you can actually hear them getting more and more fluent. And, of course, it always helps to model the paragraph to the students before they do this.