It can be helpful to consider ‘ keystone vocabulary‘ to identify those vocabulary choices that offer pupils opportunities to generate meaningful links via their talk, writing, reading and more.
More active approaches to teaching and engaging pupils with new words include Frayer Models, ‘word ladders’ (see p10), words maps, word gradients, and similar. The rise of ‘ knowledge organisers‘, and similar tools, offer opportunities to identify key vocabulary, but we should be wary of assuming stacking vocabulary in a list for some quick quizzing offers anything like the deep understanding and rich connections pupils need to make between words, phrases, concepts and big ideas. And so, careful attention to aligning the curriculum with opportunities for explicit vocabulary teaching can unlock academic challenges, such as understanding the process of photosynthesis in biology, or learning about the Great Fire of London in key stage 1. Dishing pupils a dictionary won’t necessarily lead to successful learning. We know that teaching complex academic concepts clothed in sophisticated vocabulary proves a barrier to too many pupils. This awareness of choosing vocabulary to be learnt, making rich connections that build pupils’ vocabulary schemas (networks of well connected links), has been bolstered by practical approaches to teaching these individual words and phrases, such as my SEEC model (influenced the work of brilliant researchers, such as Robert Marzano, Isabel Beck and colleagues): Image taken from the EEF’s ‘Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools Guidance Report’ In recent years, building on the excellent research from Beck, McKeown and Kucan, awareness of choosing the right words to teach has become more common across primary and secondary schools – such as their popular ‘Tiers of vocabulary’ model: Cultivating ‘word consciousness’ Explicit vocabulary teachingĮxplicit vocabulary teaching can provide a vital boost to our pupils’ vocabulary development. It is helpful to distil that wealth into consistent pillars of practice that are ‘best bets’ for supporting, and super-charging, vocabulary development: The Three Pillars of Vocabulary Teachingģ. For teachers, the key question is how can you best enhance and enrich pupils’ vocabulary.įor busy teachers, digging into the research on vocabulary development and language gaps can prove daunting. On a daily basis it is near-imperceptible, but when you begin to count the passing of school terms, you can see significant differences occurring.
Like increases in a child’s height, it is a slow but inexorable development. Pupils are language sponges, learning thousands of words each year. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that vocabulary knowledge is crucial for pupils’ school success.
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