#Vocabulary teacher professional#

Put simply, the more words you read, the more you learn. It is clear that reading rich texts, both in the classroom and beyond the school gates, is critical for language and vocabulary development. You cannot explicitly teach all the words! With over a million words in the English language, teachers make careful selections regarding subject specific vocabulary and those sophisticated Tier 2 words. For many children, this is a foreign language.вЂќ (p. Instead, what we want children to learn is the language of school. It is a schema that pupils can add to and go onto make many surprising, exciting connections as they go onto read the poems selected.

#Vocabulary teacher professional#

Now, you can rightly debate whether these are the right words to teach (it is excellent professional development to discuss these small but often crucially significant building blocks of knowledge), but the explicit attention to these words can offer a foundational understanding of what is an unfamiliar word. For example, when I have taught romantic poetry to year 7s in the past, we identified important вЂkeystoneвЂ™ nouns that unpacked a lot of the big ideas that underpin WordsworthвЂ™s poem about daffodils: It can be helpful to consider вЂ keystone vocabularyвЂ 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, вЂword laddersвЂ™ (see p10), words maps, word gradients, and similar. The rise of вЂ knowledge organisersвЂ, 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 wonвЂ™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 pupilsвЂ™ 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 EEFвЂ™s вЂImproving Literacy in Secondary Schools Guidance ReportвЂ™ 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 вЂ“ such as their popular вЂTiers of vocabularyвЂ™ model: Cultivating вЂword consciousnessвЂ™ Explicit vocabulary teachingД®xplicit vocabulary teaching can provide a vital boost to our pupilsвЂ™ vocabulary development.

It is helpful to distil that wealth into consistent pillars of practice that are вЂbest betsвЂ™ for supporting, and super-charging, vocabulary development: The Three Pillars of Vocabulary TeachingДЈ. For teachers, the key question is how can you best enhance and enrich pupilsвЂ™ vocabulary.ДЇor 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 childвЂ™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 pupilsвЂ™ school success.