Closing the Vocabulary Gap

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You are in a very similar position to a whole host of schools in my experience – the majority, not the minority. Etymology/morphology: This step is crucial and one we’re still working on embedding, as it’s more complicated and takes more time. Building on my predecessor’s legacy, I continued to deliver a ‘word-of-the-week’ to tutors during weekly staff meetings though not always convinced these were passed on to the student cohort. To help promote a love of reading for 30 minutes of every day all Key Stage 3 students, teachers and support staff “Drop Everything And Read”. Having recognised the need for worldly knowledge, we are using First News– a newspaper series for teenagers.

Featuring advice on using word banks, making links between key terms, teaching etymology and morphology, and vocabulary for exams, the English section also includes strategies to promote reading for pleasure and reading aloud, ideas to encourage word play, and activities and resources to develop students’ written vocabulary – both creative and academic. By this stage, students will have 7 years of schooling under their belt, yet, when questioned directly, will struggle to define words they should be very familiar with by now. As an adult literacy teacher, the ‘vocabulary gap’ really resonates with me : I do recognise it as a major factor which prevents my students from moving from Level 1 to Level 2- thereby blocking their way to higher study and a good career. I was appointed as Language for Learning Lead at Icknield Community College in September 2016 with a broad rather vague brief. In a sense, children are not just exposed to the definition of a word but have a detailed knowledge of its multiple meanings and the various ways that it can be used.For students like James, “reciprocal reading” - small peer group-led guided reading sessions - can prove a successful approach, helping them to deploy reading strategies deliberately with their peers. Oxford 3000 offers a handy selection of the most frequently used words in both spoken and written English. Reading passages on state tests are generally populated by Tier II vocabulary, and these are also the words that students are most likely to encounter in reading assignments across the academic curriculum.

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. Three simple and effective options are pronunciation (saying the word aloud), charades (acting the word out), and writing (using the word in context). If we don’t attend to closing the vocabulary gap early, then students like James will fulfil a dismal prophesy of struggle and failure in school. It is the core business of every teacher not just to understand how children learn to read, but also how they read to learn.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. Fantastic and insightful tome, full of food for thought that gives me the knowledge, for one, that I know and do some of this already but which, serves as a reminder to ‘make the implicit explicit’ more and more in s bid to make my classroom ‘word-rich’ no matter what my SLT might think of me.

For comprehension, two or three students read a short text, discuss it, and then ask each other set comprehension questions. It’s something primary colleagues may take for granted but embedding an effective and consistent approach to teaching literacy in secondary schools is often quite a battle. a set of classes or a plan of study on a particular subject, usually leading to an exam or qualification. Better than that, though, we noticed the improvement in students’ vocabulary in their writing and responses to texts. This is also known as generative processing and is thought to be a key step in the progression toward word ownership and mastery.In Closing the Vocabulary Gap, the author explores the increased demands of an academic curriculum and how closing the vocabulary gap between our ‘word poor’ and ‘word rich’ students could prove the vital difference between school failure and success. Quigley draws out how we need to build vocabulary knowledge to promote academic progress directly, but also so that we can support reading, with knock-on effects for progress. However, demonstrating what writing like a historian looks like and how to use appropriate Tier 2 vocabulary to achieve this was very well received. Pupils across the country are floundering because they don’t have the vocabulary to fully access the curriculum, says Alex Quigley. I was left asking: how many times is James being left struggling in the dark owing to the academic language of school?

Our use of educational rap songs takes advantage of two of the most tried-and-true mnemonic devices in human history: music and rhyme. When reading complex texts, pupils can struggle to learn new, unfamiliar words, so helping pupils with strategies to notice and record interesting vocabulary is likely to prove valuable.This generally means we are up against state selective and public schools who often have more time and resources. According to Hirsch, by second grade, a child in the middle of the family income spectrum will know, on average, 6,020 words. In simple terms, we know that school students need something like 50,000 words in their personal lexicon to flourish in secondary and beyond. We completed learning walks of vocabulary teaching to see it in practice, followed up with a student-voice survey looking at the consistency and frequency of teaching.