How To Develop Vocabulary in the Classroom
How To Develop Vocabulary in the Classroom
“Education is the process of preparing us for the big world, and the big world has big words.”
SOURCE: EDUCATION NEXT
“Sir, what does liaise mean? And what does pulchritude mean?”
On a daily basis, every teacher navigates a wealth of questions about
words and about the world. The English dictionary is replete with over
half a million words, and many of our pupils can struggle to stay afloat
as they swim in this sea of academic language.
Given the sheer breadth and depth of vocabulary of the English
language—alongside how critical it proves in mediating the academic
curriculum of school—it is crucial that every teacher has a confident understanding of teaching vocabulary in the classroom.
We cannot teach all of the words to our pupils. Their
language develops daily, inside and outside of the school gates, with
reading, talk and simply existing in the world, seeing their vocabulary
grow exponentially. And yet, we can better develop our pupils’
vocabulary, identify their gaps in understanding, and teach new words
with a greater likelihood of success.
The challenge of the ‘vocabulary gap’
The importance of vocabulary development to reading, writing and talk
is incontrovertible. Of course, much of the vocabulary development of
our pupils will happen implicitly beyond the scope of classroom
instruction. This vocabulary growth is cumulative and incremental,
founded upon reading and talk, and often hidden in plain sight in the
busy classroom.
It is the gaps in vocabulary exhibited by our pupils, rather than the
subtle growth, that too often become clear for teachers. These gaps may
show up in a difficult examination, a weak answer in class, or a subtly
limited piece of writing.
Evidence to characterize a vocabulary gap is long-standing and
sustained. A seminal study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, published in
1995 is often cited as popularizing the notions of the “vocabulary gap”
commonly described as ‘The Early Catastrophe.’ It describes the
meaningful differences in the language experiences of young children.
They estimated that before U.S. children ever got to school, there could
be a difference of language experience for children from “word rich” or
“word poor” families, with those children from word rich families
potentially hearing 30,000,000 more words than their “word poor” peers.
The vocabulary research undertaken by Hart and Risley has rightly
been critiqued. It was a small study of only 42 families, with strong
judgements being made about social class and language experience that
are contestable. Their estimates, based on limited recording technology,
were not directly replicated. Crucially, however, their seminal study
triggered a wave of research in this area. Rather than “debunking” such evidence, we find a consensus that a vocabulary gap exists and that teachers need to better understand the issue.
Newer research on the early vocabulary gap has since showed that the
gap exists and remains enduring. Our increased understanding of the
research evidence shows that the gap may be smaller than judged by Hart
and Risley, but that many children come to school with having heard
millions more words and having experienced many more rich interactions
with parents and caregivers. We have learned that turn-taking and
dialogue is of particular importance, whether around the dinner table,
or at a day out at the zoo.
Rich, cumulative experiences with words at an early age matter, influencing later performance in school.
Teachers have revealed that the vocabulary gap can hamper their
pupils in countless ways. Sometimes it is punch-you-in-the-face
stark—from a student explaining she didn’t understand the word
‘suspense’ in a standardized test, to students crying when faced with a SAT reading on “Dead Dodo’s” that they found inscrutable.
A recent Oxford University Press survey including more than 1,300
teachers found that vocabulary, or the lack thereof, is a salient issue
for them and their pupils. Primary school teachers reported that 49% of
their Year 1 pupils did not have the vocabulary to access the school
curriculum. This was repeated with secondary school teachers, with
teachers stating that 43% of Year 7 pupils faced the same issue.
Consider for a moment the implications of such barriers. Though there
are legions of challenges for a teacher supporting pupils in the
classroom, our pupils possessing the academic language required to
access the school curriculum is of critical importance.
When faced with pupils who are struggling with the demands of an
academic curriculum, teachers can feel unprepared. Fundamentally, our
pupils’ ability to read well is inextricably linked to their vocabulary.
Every standardized test examination makes that challenge explicit. For
pupils with reading difficulties, vocabulary instruction can be a great
help, but it can be beneficial to mediate the language of school for every pupil.
The academic vocabulary of school
So, what makes the language of school unique? Can we describe what makes such language “academic”?
The academic language of school is unlike the words that we use in
our talk with friends and family. In school, this is evident in most of
the academic reading talks, but particularly with our reading of dense
informational texts (so prominent in the secondary school curriculum),
we are exposed to many more rare words than in our typical talk. Indeed,
if I was to read an apt story to my eight-year-old son this evening,
the book we would read would likely have 50% more rare words than that
of the typical professional dialogue between teachers.
Researchers William Nagy and Dianna Townsend have helpfully described six common features that describe typical academic language:
1. A high proportion of Latin and Greek vocabulary.
2. A high proportion of complex words that have complex spellings.
3. A high proportion of nouns, adjectives, and prepositions.
4. A high proportion of expanded noun phrases and nominalisation.
5. A high degree of informational density, i.e. few words that carry lots of meanings.
6. A high degree of abstraction, i.e. words that are removed from the concrete here and now.
One of the defining characteristics of the “academic code” of school—
both in spoken and written language—is the sophisticated word choices
that pack knowledge and meaning into singular words.
A grammatical term for this process—more specifically when we change
verbs into nouns—is called “nominalization.” Put simply, it describes
how when a pupil uses the verb “sweat,” we transform the words into a
sophisticated noun, such as “perspiration.” Suddenly, when our pupils
deploy nominalization in their talk and writing they begin to sound
“academic.” It makes for language that is precise, accurate and proves
invariably impressive.
Many academic words in the English language—estimated to be around 70%—are “polysemous,” which is to say that they have multiple meanings. This often trips up our word-poor pupils.
Take the word “prime.” Ask your class what they think of
when they hear the word prime, and they’ll likely mention Amazon or
Optimus Prime of Transformers fame. And yet, ask every mathematics
teacher and they will relate the mathematical meaning of a prime number.
Even then, ask an English teacher, or a technology teacher, and they’ll
give the common meaning of “first importance.” Crucially then, we need
to make sure every student knows what prime means in every subject—not
just mathematics.
Science in particular can prove tricky for our pupils. So many words
in science challenge them because their general meaning simply doesn’t
match their specific scientific meaning. Take “force” in science. In the
physics classroom, it has very specific and plays an important role,
but then “force” in English, history, or sociology—the more general
usage—can have very different connotations. As it is so central to
physics understanding, teachers typically invest time in helping pupils
understand the difference, but it still requires close attention.
Mathematics is a subject that is beset by a similar problem. With
specialist mathematical vocabulary, such as “acute,” “constant,”
“expand,” “expression,” “factor,” “rational,” and “translation,” pupils
bring their common, everyday knowledge to them. Unfortunately, such
partial knowledge can lead to over-confidence and pupils possessing
unhelpful misconceptions. Polysemous words like “acute” reveal the
critical importance of our pupils not just knowing many words, but to
know them deeply.
The magic of morphology
How do you teach a new word?
Seldom will a word be understood and used by pupils if they only ever
experience that word in a long list. No word list will encompass the
range of academic vocabulary— including the complex interrelatedness of
such words and phrases—required by our pupils to access the entire span
of the school curriculum. Instead, we must consider a range of
approaches to teaching vocabulary, so that our pupils can use such
strategies independently.
A common myth is that pupils need only a dictionary, and then access
to the language of school is theirs. Consider for a moment: just how
much knowledge is required to use a dictionary successfully? Pupils need
spelling (orthographic) knowledge and they need to have enough depth of
word knowledge to select the right word meaning when multiple options
are typically offered. Dictionaries can prove a catch-22 for too many
pupils.
Instead of relying on the dictionary, we can instead foreground the
power of vocabulary study and developing “word consciousness” in our
pupils. That is to say, an innate curiosity to question words, to
explore their roots and parts, layers of meaning, their relationships
with other words (e.g. synonyms and antonyms) and so on.
A useful approach to fostering word consciousness is to explicitly
teach word parts (morphology) and word histories (etymology). Human
beings are pattern-making machines, and with language we are no
different. With meanings hidden in plain sight, pupils will be breaking
challenging new words into their constituent parts— what linguists call
morphemes. For example, words like ‘dyslexia’ get broken down into the
prefix “dys” (meaning “bad”) and “lexia” (meaning word)— being bad with
words.
Rather than leaving pupils to do this haphazardly, we can harness
this pattern making urge to help them better understand many of the
fancy academic words that adorn our subject domains. In English
literature, for example, if an author is using “foreshadowing” then they
are literally offering shadowy hints (be)”fore” something bad is going
to happen in the story. These simple mental hooks add memorable meaning
to words.
Take the word “intractable,” meaning “hard to
control or deal with.” In a history lesson this could describe
Anglo-French relations during the Hundred Years’ War. In geography, it
could refer to problems with natural resources. If we dig into those
mighty morphemes again then we realise something very familiar. The root
of the word, “tract,” means “to pull”—just like a tractor, with the
“in” prefix meaning “not.” Quite literally then, the word represents how
something is hard to pull apart.
The utility of teaching morphology explicitly across the school curriculum is high. We know
that such knowledge is intimately related to reading comprehension
success. Not only that, a significant number of academic words we use in
school have ancient Latin and Greek origins, with the proportion being
as high as 90% in areas of the curriculum like maths and science.
We can see how the Latinate vocabulary of school typically makes for
bigger, more complex words that we expect pupils to use in their school
writing in particular:
| Anglo-Saxon origins | Latin and Greek origins |
| Ask | Interrogate |
| Begin | Commence |
| Belly | Abdomen |
| Nightly | Nocturnal |
(Table adapted from my 2018 book Closing the Vocabulary Gap.)
Such words with Latin and Greek roots may be more sophisticated, and
often separate from the daily language of our pupils. They offer us
strategies, though, to help pupils hook their knowledge onto new words.
For example, you can study the vocabulary of religious education, and
such associated worldly knowledge, and explicitly teach the morphology
and etymology of singular words to open up a world of faith that may
otherwise be alien to them.
Take the words “theology” and “theism” that are at the very root of understanding religions. The root of the word “theism” is the Greek word “theos,” meaning “god.” The root “the”
is at the heart of so many related terms: atheism, monotheism,
polytheism, pantheism, theology, theocracy and more. By securing these
linguistic roots, the very roots of religious understanding are unveiled
to our students. Not only that, pupils begin to note that the suffix
“ology”’ is very common in school (meaning “the study of…”). Patterns
hidden in the English language become visible and such knowledge is
compelling.
Happily, approaching the development of the vocabulary of our pupils
in this way helps pupils to learn not just one word at a time, but to
learn ten. They become word conscious that words have histories, parts,
rich families, and countless meaningful connections that open up a world
of powerful knowledge.
Practical teaching strategies
Developing vocabulary in classrooms can occur in countless ways.
There is no singular methodology or silver bullet that emerges from the
research evidence. Instead, we need to attend to developing teacher
knowledge of the challenge, whilst reflecting carefully and monitoring
our approaches to explicit vocabulary instruction. We also need to
carefully tend to the implicit development of language gained from
reading and rich, structured talk.
Some daily strategies may include:
• Word generation. One
approach to teaching morphology is to get pupils to generate as many
words as they can from a word root or prefix. For example, the prefix
“dec” is familiar enough in words like ‘decade’ and ‘decathlon’ (from
the Latin – ‘decimas’ – meaning “tenth”). See how many words pupils
generate in groups, then try the whole class.
• “Word mapping.”
Students are familiar with using graphic organizers in all sorts of
guises, from Venn diagrams to fishbone diagrams. They help translate
tricky vocabulary and hard concepts into visual models that aid
understanding. For example, with “geothermic processes” as a head word
in geography, this would be followed by “endogenic” and “exogenic”
processes. Each of these word headings then connects conceptually to
other related words and processes. It is simple stuff, but it brings
coherence and clarity with regard to subject specific words and ideas.
• ‘Working Word Walls’. A ‘working word wall’
is so much more than a display – though it may not even look very
aesthetically pleasing – it is wall space that is used to recognise and
record for our pupils a wealth of words. We can record new words we use
in our teaching and use the wall space to highlight word roots, connect
to word families, and more.
• ‘Vocabulary 7-up’. This
is a simple vocabulary game that encourages pupils to record as many
synonyms as they can for common words (seven ideally). So, given
“positive,” “effective,” “large,” or “small,” our students exercise
their capacity to draw upon a range of synonyms for those words. This
activity assesses their breadth of vocabulary, but also overtly signals
to students the necessary variety of words required in their academic
expression.
• “Six degrees of separation.”
The simple idea of this game is that all living things in the world are
connected by six or fewer steps. Take the following vocabulary links
between “abnormal” and “supercilious.” Straight away, pupils need to
draw upon their vocabulary knowledge—of synonyms, antonyms and
more—before then drawing upon their personal vocabulary knowledge. My
effort? Abnormal > strange > mysterious > special > superior > supercilious. With a little self-explanation, you can encourage pupils to elaborate on their ideas.
Vocabulary instruction must always prove more than singling out
subject-specific words, compiling word lists and weekly tests. It is a
fundamental part of how we communicate the vast array of knowledge at
the heart of the school curriculum, not a one-off strategy.
It is helpful to leave the final word on vocabulary development to
one of the most heralded researchers of the English Language: Professor David Crystal.
He poses the value, the related challenges, and the potential rewards
of effective vocabulary instruction on offer for every teacher:
“Education is the process of preparing us for the big world, and the big
world has big words. The more big words I know, the better I will
survive in it. Because there are hundreds of thousands of big words in
English, I cannot learn them all. But this doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t
try to learn some.”
Alex Quigley is the national content manager at the Education
Endowment Foundation, which is based in London. He was an English
teacher and school leader for 15 years. This article is adapted from a
chapter in The ResearchEd Guide To Literacy: An Evidence-Informed Guide For Teachers (John Catt, 2019, $15, 160 pages.)
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