We should encourage children to read broadly for pleasure, while immersing them in word-rich classrooms which focus on vocabulary development. Explain. Carefully pronounce the new word, write the word, offer a student-friendly definition and multiple examples. Both implicit approaches (e.g. reading stories to children and promoting reading for pleasure) and explicit approaches to teaching vocabulary (e.g. directly teaching new vocabulary) are essential for developing and broadening children’s language. There is also a need to explore vocabulary in reading, writing, for spoken language and across the curriculum. Practical strategies in the classroom

Foster structured reading opportunities in a model that supports students with vocabulary deficits. While music and rhyme are excellent, there are other strategies that can be used to teach a new word. Three simple and effective options are pronunciation (saying the word aloud), charades (acting the word out), and writing (using the word in context). This short blog series is targeted at literacy leaders – either Literacy Coordinators, Reading Leads, or Curriculum Deputies – with a key role in leading literacy to ensure that pupils access the curriculum and succeed in meeting the academic demands of school. Few school leaders get trained in communications. Yet, in almost all facets of … Achieving consistency takes relentless effort but we take staff workload seriously, and the goal is to improve literacy via vocabulary in a way that works for our students and staff. We’re still on our journey to achieving that. What impact have you seen so far? In simple terms, we know that school students need something like 50,000 words in their personal lexicon to flourish in secondary and beyond. A primary school-age child is typically learning at a rate of around 4,000 or 5,000 new words a year. How can we supercharge this vocabulary development?Understand the importance of academic vs. everyday words and cross-curricular words vs. subject-specific words Renowned cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has shown just how crucial word knowledge is to accessing the school curriculum: “Studies have measured readers’ tolerance of unfamiliar vocabulary, and have estimated that readers need to know about 98 per cent of the words for comfortable comprehension.” After over fifteen years in the classroom, I now support the cause of education from the other side the school gates. For most of the week I work for an educational charity, supporting teachers and school leaders to access research evidence. Another key strand in supporting students’ acquisition of vocabulary is through oracy. Inset CPD has been used to support teacher questioning and classroom discussion. Some disciplines, such as science, are less comfortable using debate and teachers have asked for further support with this. We are a Teams school and the use of breakout rooms was a function that I found particularly useful in online teaching. The capacity to drop in and out of small group discussion was rewarding – even if occasionally students were caught ‘off topic’!

Duke, N., Moses, M. (2003) 10 Research-Tested Ways to Build Children’s Vocabulary. New York: Scholastic. To promote this culture, I led whole school inset training in 2018 which introduced staff to tiered vocabulary and the demands of writing like a scientist/geographer/literary critic. Tier 3 vocabulary teaching can be regarded a key strand of the science curriculum for example. However, demonstrating what writing like a historian looks like and how to use appropriate Tier 2 vocabulary to achieve this was very well received. This led to 1:1 sessions with heads of departments, most notably Art. For instance, we devised word lists that students might use to describe colour, but which would also enhance descriptive writing in English. Thus ‘vivid’ suddenly appeared in almost every piece of Year 7 writing to describe setting! This can lead to cliché but nonetheless, students are finding it easier to make connections across the curriculum and bring wider thinking to their learning.If we know what words are in daily use, we can help our students improve their speech with the academic vocabulary that sets them apart for success beyond the school gates. Word consciousness’ is an “awareness and interest in words and their meanings” (put a little more interestingly, it is pupils “bumping into spicy, tasty words that catch your tongue”). This love of language and continual curiosity about what words mean, where they are from, and their legion of connections, feels like the end-game of great vocabulary teaching. With careful cultivation, this curiosity can be fostered and it can help fuel our pupils’ school success. One Word at a Time – Teach Secondary article– this article is an accessible way in to the ideas and strategies developed in my book. We also offer 15 minute reading interventions with supporting staff – these are split into three categories: fluency, comprehension, and dyslexia.For fluency, a student chooses a text from the appropriate level and will read it until they are fluent.For comprehension, two or three students read a short text, discuss it, and then ask each other set comprehension questions.For dyslexia, we follow a morphophonological approach; explicitly teaching etymology, phonics, and inviting the students to ‘play’ with the words on the worksheets provided.We have seen huge improvements in reading ages following our reading interventions, but have only recently split them into these three categories.We are keen to see the impact of this in next year’s data collection.

However, much of the rest could have done with a little more editing both in terms of unnecessary repetitious rambling and the odd bit of slightly tiresome political commentary. For busy teachers, digging into the research on vocabulary development and language gaps can prove daunting. 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 TeachingRich, structured talk is a solution to closing the vocabulary gap in our classroom. If this is twinned with high-quality reading instruction, then we are well on the way to helping children thrive with any curriculum. Connections between words are at the heart of this book. In English, despite many exceptions, there is a systematic relationship between letters and sounds, and, therefore, between spoken and written words. In contrast, relations between word forms and their meanings appear arbitrary. However, with more knowledge about words, morphology and etymology, it is clear that there are, in fact, regularities here, too.