Closing the Vocabulary Gap

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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.

To stretch and challenge all children or for older children, they could explore the word class(es) and/or apply their knowledge through grammar, e.g. they might write a sentence using a subordinate clause or a command. (Please see my webinar and accompanying resources for further examples of this.) The RESCUE strategy can be used in one lesson but the explain section could be completed at a later date and/or the word could be applied to their writing. Support for schools – Reception (P1), Year 1 (P2) and Year 2 (P3) Building children’s vocabularies opens doors to harder, more rewarding curriculums and lifelong learning, writes Alex Quigley, but it needs careful focus A primary goal of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction is to model for students the depth of knowledge that is involved in mastering words: to own a word is to know not just its definition but its different forms, its multiple meanings, its connotations, and the situations in which its normally applied.’

Classroom support for primary schools

The key to effective vocabulary instruction is to get creative and find ways to bring words to life. The use of interactive mini-games can be used with word lists to do so. 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). Yet many secondary schools struggle to work on vital literacy skills in subjects outside of the English department.

Importantly, once children can read, it also involves written words. Vocabulary breadth - the number of words that you know - is important. But, as Quigley emphasises, so too is vocabulary depth: what you know about words and how they connect to other words.So I *might* have mentioned this already, but I have gone and written a book – published officially this Friday! ‘Closing the Vocabulary Gap’ has proven a labour of love for the last eighteen months of my life and I’m proud to get a hold of it and send it out into the world. 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 … We must give our students the necessary tools to develop their vocabulary independently. If we want a school-leaver to have something like 50,000 words, it’s a daunting task. But we can close the gap: by explicitly teaching a mere few hundred words well in the classroom, children grow their vocabulary exponentially by learning the related word families and having more tools to read independently with success. Children can go on to learn around 3,000 to 4,000 words annually. Year upon year of such growth sees the 50,000 figure become achievable for each child we teach. This book offers a great overview of the research on learning vocabulary, and practical advice　on how to apply this research in the classroom." – Daisy Christodoulou, Research and Development Manager, ARK Schools, UK Thanks a lot for your valuable blog. I do appreciate reading and learning frrom " Crafting Great Sentences". I like…