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In recent years there has been growing concern about the "vocabulary gap" widening between children from different socioeconomic groups. By age three, it is believed that children growing up in poor neighborhoods or from lower-income families may hear up to 30 million fewer words than their more privileged counterparts.

There are a broad range of advocates, organizations, and researchers tackling the vocabulary gap between rich and poor children. In this blog post I will discuss the latest research and provide links to some of the various resources parents and caregivers can access if you are interested in expanding your child's vocabulary and shrinking the 'word gap.'

Anne Fernald is a psychology professor at Stanford University who has discovered that the language gap between rich and poor children emerges during infancy.

On February 14, 2014, at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference held at the University of Chicago, Dr. Fernald presented a lecture titled "How Talking to Children Nurtures Language Development Across SES and Culture." The presentation brought together over fifty years of research confirming that the children of lower-income parents typically enter school with poorer language skills than their more affluent peers.

According to Fernald, five-year-old children of lower socioeconomic status (SES) score two years behind on standardized language development tests by the time they enter school. In fact, a March 2013 study by Fernald and colleagues titled, "SES Differences in Language processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at 18 Months," reported that signs of the vocabulary gap are evident before a child is even two-years-old.

The two factors that most explain the income-related gaps in school readiness are parenting styles and home learning environments. This is actually good news because it means that if we can better equip parents with the knowledge and tools to succeed as their children's first teachers-and mobilize them to act on that knowledge and use those tools-we could see a significant decline in both the vocabulary and school readiness gap.

In October 2013, Hillary Clinton, who is dedicated to closing the vocabulary gap, wrote,

Studies have found that by age four, children in middle and upper class families hear 15 million more words than children in working-class families, and 30 million more words than children in families on welfare. This disparity in hearing words from parents and caregivers translates directly into a disparity in learning words. And that puts our children born with the fewest advantages even further behind. Among those born in 2001, only 58 percent of poor children started school ready to learn, compared to 75 percent of children from middle-income families.

Researchers believe that low-income parents may underestimate by as much as 50 percent the impact that they can have on improving their child's vocabulary and cognitive development. This is why it's so important to get this message out there and to offer simple ways that parents from every socioeconomic background can strive to shrink the vocabulary gap.

When parents understand the long-term benefits of investing time in a child's vocabulary, the more time they invest... which is the most effective way to close the word gap.
The Vocabulary Gap Between Rich and Poor Is Often Established Before Age Two
Dr. Fernald's research has shown that significant differences in both vocabulary and real-time language processing efficiency were already evident at age 18 months in English-learning infants from higher- and lower-SES families. By age 24 months, there was already a six-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development.

Fernald and her colleagues at The Center for Infant Studies at Stanford used special technology to make all-day recordings of low-SES Spanish-learning children in their home environments. The researchers found striking variability in how much parents talked to their children.

Fernald suggests that slower processing rates are partly responsible for slower vocabulary growth in the early years. Fernald says that toddlers learn new vocabulary from context, and the faster a child can get at the words he or she knows, the more able the child is to figure out the next word in the sentence and to learn any new words that follow. This is one reason that unplugging the television and reading to young children is so important.

Infants who heard more child-directed speech developed greater efficiency in language processing and learned new words more quickly. The results indicate that exposure to child-directed speech-as opposed to overheard speech-sharpens infants' language processing skills, which creates an upward spiral for learning vocabulary.
The Three T's: Tune In. Talk More. Take Turns.

Dr. Dana Suskind is a Professor of Surgery at the University of Chicago and the Founder and Director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative. Thirty Million Words helps parents enhance their home language environment in order to optimize their child's brain development and, therefore, his or her ability to learn.

Dr. Suskind's ultimate goal, and that of her team, is to help all children reach their full potentials and to close the ever-widening vocabulary and achievement gap. Dr. Suskind has developed a succinct way for parents and caregivers to expand a child's vocabulary based on the Three T's:

1. Tune In by paying attention to what your child is focused on or communicating with you.

2. Talk More with your child using lots of descriptive words to build his or her vocabulary.

3. Take Turns with your child by engaging in his or her conversation.

For more specifics on what you can do as a parent or caregiver please take a few minutes to listen to this NPR piece about practical ways to shrink the word gap.
Too Small to Fail
Too Small to Fail is a partnership with Next Generation and the Clinton Foundation that aims to help parents and businesses improve the health, well-being, and future opportunities for children ages zero to five. The mission of Too Small to Fail is to have American children from all walks of life and socioeconomic groups positioned to succeed in the 21st century. As the father of a six-year-old, this is a mission that I am passionate about.

The organization is working to promote new research on the science of children's brain development, early learning and early health. They want to help parents, businesses and communities identify specific actions, consistent with new research, that they can utilize to improve the lives of young children. For an informative video on early child development, and the work that Too Small to Fail is doing, click here.

New brain research has shown that early adverse childhood experiences can harm the development of a child's brain. The prefrontal cortex of the brain-which is associated with the ability to pay attention, exhibit self-control, organize and plan-is particularly vulnerable during childhood development.

Too Small to Fail is building a public action campaign that will span the areas of early learning, early health, and family support. However, their immediate efforts are focused on closing the vocabulary gap.

The driving force of Too Small to Fail is founded on a belief that a 'poverty of vocabulary' should be discussed with the same passion as child hunger. When a child is deprived of food, there is public outrage because child hunger is correctly identified as a moral and economic issue that moves people to action. The vocabulary gap should be viewed with the same urgency as child malnutrition.
Conclusion: Childhood Socioeconomic Status Is Not Destiny
Unfortunately, inequities that present themselves in early life can create a ripple effect throughout a person's life. According to researchers, most of the high school achievement gap between poor, middle-income and wealthy students is already visible by kindergarten and the children who have weak pre-literacy and numeracy skills in kindergarten are, on average, the same children with weak vocabulary and math skills in seventh grade.

To combat this phenomenon, Anne Fernald and colleagues at Stanford are now running a parent- education intervention study with low-income Spanish-speaking mothers in East San Jose, California, called ¡Habla conmigo! (Talk with Me!). The study teaches Latina mothers how they can support their infants' early brain development and helps them learn new strategies for engaging verbally with their children.

Although they only have data from 32 families so far, the preliminary results are promising. Mothers in the ¡Habla conmigo! program are communicating more and using higher quality language with their 18-month-olds compared to mothers in a control group.

"What's most exciting," said Fernald, "is that by 24 months the children of more engaged moms are developing bigger vocabularies and processing spoken language more efficiently. Our goal is to help parents understand that by starting in infancy, they can play a role in changing their children's life trajectory."

In previous research on caregivers' speech to Spanish-learning children, Fernald's group found big differences in levels of parental engagement even within a disadvantaged group of families. Those lower socioeconomic status kids who heard more child-directed talk got faster in processing and learned language more rapidly, according to Fernald.

"It's clear that SES is not destiny," Fernald concludes. "The good news is that regardless of economic circumstances, parents who use more and richer language with their infants can help their child to learn more quickly."

If you'd like to read more on this topic, check out my Psychology Today blog posts:
Follow me on Twitter @ckbergland for updates on The Athlete's Way blog posts.

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Tackling the "Vocabulary Gap" Between Rich and Poor Children

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By age three, children from lower income families may hear up to 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. In this blog post I will discuss the latest research on the 'vocabulary gap' and provide links to resources parents and caregivers can access to help build your child's vocabulary and shrink the 'word gap.'

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Research Paper

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Beyond Bloom - Cognitive Taxonomy Revised

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Beyond Bloom - Cognitive Taxonomy Revised

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There's been quite a bit written about knowledge organisers of late. Heather Fearn wrote here about the purpose; Michael Tidd and Jon Brunskill have explained their use in primary; Debra Kidd expressed her misgivings here. I want to explain how I use them in history lessons, and how we use them as a school.

Many of us have been using some form of organiser for ages. It makes sense to, right? To have all the key stuff on one sheet, all neat and easily emailable and stickable and readable. My first school used to have 'The Germany 25', whilst at my second I made a Cold War chronology which we tested every lesson. But it wasn't until I read and saw Joe Kirby's explanation of Michaela's usage that I really thought about how the humble KO's organisation might be more than just a reference point. There's no point me re-explaining their purpose: that's been done, and done well, before. But here's what I did, what I do, and what we do.
The pilot
I introduced a KO to history in October 2015. I was writing a new SoW and wanted to ensure a consistent body of knowledge was delivered by the non-specialists.

The three constants I wanted in every KO were chronology, that format in which historical knowledge essentially appears, key people and key ideas, events and actions. My first attempt, for an origin-of-WWI unit with Y8, had two maps: Europe in 1914 and again in 1918. I quickly recognised what I'd change next time: number each piece of information, embolden, each time, the absolutely vital repeating key words, and reduce the amount of information; no more than ten key people, for example.

At first we only used these in lessons: I'd test, every lesson, a particular strand, at least three times. Their ability to recall key knowledge improved, obviously, but so did the attitude of those less previously enamoured towards the subject. Why? Because suddenly they were getting 10/10.

Susie Nash, a geography teacher who I shared a history class with, took up the challenge and began to write versions for her subject. We continued for all years, all the way up to Y13. In the summer the school recognised the success we were having and so moved to introduce these across the whole school, starting with KS3 in September, and moving to all years by Christmas.
The lesson
Pretty much every history lesson I teach, bar the odd A-level class, begins with a KO test. I say what to revise, they study for a moment and then have a couple of minutes to recall in the backs of their books: "One-to-ten, key events ... Go!" It's quick, aids their recall for the lesson, and starts every hour positively, simply because they do it all the time. My mantra is this: if you really don't know then think for 20 seconds; if it doesn't come to you then look at your own KO, then go back and try again; once you've finished you can self mark and do it again.

We'll sometimes return to this four or five times in a lesson. The record is twelve, by which point Y11 said, "Sir, this is boring now." I asked why. "Because we know it. We keep getting 100%."

EXACTLY.

As the KO is essentially the SoW, everything that we teach will come from it. Therefore, Y9 might not study Hjalmar Schacht's New Plan until we're three quarters through the course, but they'll have heard of it, and that makes learning about it much easier as it saves them from adding something new to their working memory. I can say "And therefore Schacht introduced his 'New Plan'" and they don't freak out - they've already heard of it, and they know who he was because he's a key person.

The chronology is the really important bit for me. It doesn't tell the story, no. Of course not. But it does help with the if it hadn't been for x ... bit of history. That knowledge is there, consistently: they don't need to strain to remember when the Civil War was, and instead can focus on what it meant - and they can use the KO for that too.

The KO isn't the be-all, but it isn't meant to be: it's the foundation and the map; it isn't everything in between, of course - that's the job of the teacher. But it's so much easier to get to that in-between when the land has already been mapped.

When writing it should become redundant, if the knowledge has been remembered. I want them to use their KOs when putting arguments together to start with, and I want them to be revisiting it as much possible when we're stepping back, but I also want them to remember, and so that means using it tactically: revise at home, use when planning, but it's away when we write. The better we get, the less we should need the KO.

I've designed knowledge assessments so that 80% is directly from the KO: if you've learned it then you'll get at least 80%. The rest is the everything-else; the not-so-vital but really great, the rephrased and nuanced.
The school
All KS3-4 now have homework where they spend twenty-minutes on a particular subject's KO. They have homework booklets in which they practise, and these are checked every morning by tutors. I know that on a Friday morning my Y7 tutor group should have been self-quizzing their history, and if I think they've not spent that time correctly then they win a lunchtime revision session. The teacher doesn't have to worry about checking it, and the tutor just has to use common sense.

And even if we're being fooled, well, it'll come out in the wash. I tell my Y7s that if they're not getting at least 80% on their history assessment then they haven't done their history homework for the term. After all, on top of their homework we're constantly revisiting this in class and the whole course is built on it.

In history we've certainly found that pupils' knowledge is greater, and they're clearly aware of what's coming up next. My Y9s are always preempting me: "Is that why he introduced the Enabling Act in March? Because it was on our KO."

And what's really telling, I think, is that Y9 to Y13 all asked for KOs to study from before they became a whole-school technique. Y13 actually ask me when the next one is coming out!

If you'd like some examples then please let me know at tfrench@tqacademy.co.uk.

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There's been quite a bit written about knowledge organisers of late. Heather Fearn wrote here about the purpose; Michael Tidd and Jon Brunskill have explained their use in primary; Debra Kidd expressed her misgivings here. I want to explain how I use them in history lessons, and how we use them as a school.

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Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. Matthew 13:12

In the world of the 2012 Ofsted framework very few schools are going to quibble with the prominence being given to the teaching of literacy but I'm far from concerned that we're clear on precisely why teaching literacy is so important beyond the fact that Big Brother is watching you: running scared of Wilshaw is not enough.

I saw the fantastic Geoff Barton deliver a presentation called Don't Call it Literacy at the Wellington Education Festival last year and his insightful thinking made a tremendous impression on me. Geoff very generously links to all his presentations on his website here. The first thing I did after witnessing this tour-de-force performance was read Daniel Rigney's excellent book The Matthew Effect. His message is stark and having read it there's no going back. As teachers we need to know that if we're not explicitly addressing the needs of 'have nots', then the gap between the word-rich and word-poor will get ever wider.

Rigney tells us that, "While good readers gain new skills very rapidly, and quickly move from learning to read to reading to learn, poor readers become increasingly frustrated with the act of reading, and try to avoid reading where possible." Who can argue with that? Few people persevere with something they find difficult and uncomfortable. No one wants to feel stupid, and struggling to read is guaranteed to make you look thick. What happens is that "students who begin with high verbal aptitudes find themselves in verbally enriched social environments and have a double advantage." If you're literate you will gravitate towards literate friends. It comes as no surprise that "good readers may choose friends who also read avidly while poor readers seek friends with whom they share other enjoyments". And these friendships make a difference. The more we interact with the word rich, the deeper our own pool of words will be. Because, as Myhill and Fisher point out, "spoken language forms a constraint, a ceiling not only on the ability to comprehend but also on the ability to write, beyond which literacy cannot progress". So, if our spoken language isn't up to snuff nothing else will be either.

Here's the principle in action:

Poor literacy results in some shocking statistics:

One in five parents easily find the opportunity to read to their children, with the rest struggling to read to their children due to fatigue and busy lifestyles

One in six people in the UK struggle with literacy. This means their literacy is below the level expected of an eleven year old

Seven million adults in England cannot locate the page reference for plumbers in the Yellow Page

1-in-16 adults cannot identify a concert venue on a poster that contains the name of band, price, date, time and venue

More than half of British motorists cannot interpret road signs properly.

If the problem starts with poor reading skills then so must the solution. Robert MacFarlane asserts that "every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write" and conversely every hour spent avoiding reading causes the word-poor to get poorer. And this is only going to get worse. As the EU High Level Report on Literacy points out, "the digital world is centred around the written word". Those who struggle to read and write are at a catastrophic disadvantage.

So whose fault is it?

Well, apportioning blame never really helps but it's interesting to note that at age 7 children in the top quartile have 7100 words while children in the lowest quartile have less than 3000. At this age we could argue that the main influence is parents. But one study shows that at 16 1 in 12 children have a 'working vocabulary of around 800 words. Whose fault is that? I can't help but hear George Sampson's call to arms ringing in my ears: "Every teacher in English is a teacher of English". Whether you agree with this is now irrelevant as the principle's been enshrined in the revised Teaching Standards.

We are responsible if not to blame. No one else can or will help the word-poor so it's up to us. But are we up to the task?

Anecdotally, I hear that many teachers struggle with their own literacy and obviously, this will be a barrier in their roles as teachers of English. So, what to do? Well, obviously we have a duty as professionals to do something about our own literacy. And clearly schools have a duty to provide training which helps address this problem. Ofsted note in Removing barriers to Literacy that "...in the secondary schools where teachers in all subject departments had received training in teaching literacy and where staff had included an objective for literacy in all the lessons, senior managers noted an improvement in outcomes across all subjects, as well as in English." So this is about self-interest as much as anything else.

They also say:

[S]chools need a coherent policy on developing literacy in all subjects if standards of reading and writing are to be improved. Even with effective teaching in English lessons, progress will be limited if this good practice is not consolidated in the 26 out of 30 lessons each week in a secondary school that are typically lessons other than English or the 70% or so of lessons in primary schools that do not focus on English. This debate is, of course, long established and formed a central point of the Bullock report on English published in 1975. Previous efforts to raise literacy as a whole-school initiative have tended at best to have a short-term impact. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Education recently reported that "schools should be developing cross-departmental strategies to develop literacy" and recommended that Ofsted should look "more closely at this".

Moving English Forward (2012)

So, here are some cross departmental strategies for developing literacy

As Geoff Barton says, "the secret to literacy is making the implicit explicit". As members of what he calls The Literacy Club, we implicitly understand how to read and write skilfully. The mistake often made by teachers is to assume that students share this implicit understanding. Some do but most don't. Those that don't need this process to be made explicit if they're to have a chance of doing what we find easy.

3 x reading strategies (skimming, scanning and independent research)

3 x writing strategies (long & short sentences, varied sentence starts, varied connectives)

3 x spelling strategies (what words look like, sound like and other connections e.g. mnemonics)

Reading
Skimming
It's easy to get confused about the difference between skimming and scanning: skimming is about quickly getting an overview of what a text is about whilst scanning is about retrieving specific information. Expert readers do these things unthinkingly. Poor readers just see acres of text and give up. We need to make it clear to students what we're doing when we read. We need to explain that the first sentence of a paragraph is often a topic sentence which summarises what the rest of the paragraph will be about. We need to explain that some words are more important and contain meaning while some words can be safely ignored. Try showing students a page of text for 5 seconds. Ask them if they knew what it was about. Ask them how they knew. This is excellent practice for being able to decipher pages of text.
Scanning
Expert readers implicitly understand how exam questions relate to passages of text. The answer to the first question will be near the beginning and the answers to later questions will be located logically throughout the text. Many students don't know this and given a list of questions have literally no idea how to find the information they need. It seems obvious to members of the Literacy Club that the key points in a text will either be in the first or last paragraph - we need to explain this to to the word-poor students we teach.
Independent research
Independent learning is great, right? Well, no. Often it's not. In the worst cases independent research is simply FOFO (fuck off and find out) and results in students make all manner of terrible mistakes from plagiarism to basic lack of understanding of my the internet should be used. If you give a students a homework task to 'research the life of Martin Luther King' what are they going to do? Obviously they'll type it straight into Google. The unwary may well end up clicking on a link like this:

What they pop in the homework will not be what you were expecting and it won't really be their fault. Students benefit from knowing that they should look at least 3 sources to get a range of opinion. They should also be taught about how to develop a thesis to narrow the focus of their research and make their task more manageable.

Writing
Long and short sentences
English teachers waste a lot of valuable time banging on about compound and complex sentences. These things are worth knowing but across the curriculum, students will benefit from the clear and simple expectation that their writing should contain a mix of long and short sentences. That is all.
Varied sentence starts
Too much of the writing students produce can be mind numbingly tedious. This is not a good thing. Try banning the use of articles (a, the) to start sentences. Encourage them to begin some sentences with words that end in -ly (adverbs) -ing (present participles) and -ed (past participles). That way we will get stuff like, "Hungrily, I wolfed my dinner", "Laughing, I walked over to my friends" and "Shocked, she notice her phone was missing."
Varied connectives
Moreover, connectives are dead easy to teach and consequently they make you look clever when you use them in your writing. It sticks in the craw to call them connects cos as an English teach I prefer the elegance of discourse markers but this is a simpler name for students (and staff.) Simply point them out in a text and ask students what job they're doing. They get them to connect their own sentences and paragraphs using a prompt sheet like the one below:

Hey presto! thinking becomes more structured and writing becomes more coherent. For some more ideas on improving writing, take a look at my Slow Writing post below.

Spelling

I have a theory that people who are 'good at spelling' are simply implicitly aware of various spelling tricks. I cannot correctly spell receive with recalling 'i before e except after c' and need to sound out Feb-ru-ary to have a chance of getting it right. But these processes are invisible to students: they just see the awesome spelling machine I have trained myself to be.

I really like these three symbols for prompting students how to approach spelling:

Next time someone asks you how to spell a word instead of simply giving them the answer and making them dependent on you for answers help them work out a strategy for remembering how to spell it in the future. One of my favourites is my strategy for the word 'rhythm'. I could never remember this and always had to look it up before writing it on the board (English teachers use this more than you might imagine) until a student point out that Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move. Genius.

These strategies are not a panacea and are just a beginning. They will however give all teachers some simple too use teaching techniques which students will then have reinforced in all their lessons. It's the start of a what for many will be a long and uncomfortable journey, but as Einstein said to Socrates, 'A journey begins with a single step.'

Related posts

Reading should be our top priority
How slowing down can improve your writing
How should we teach reading?

Geoff Barton's essential presentation Don't Call it Literacy

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The Matthew Effect - why literacy is so important - David Didau: The Learning Spy

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Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

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Tier 1, 2 and 3 vocabulary

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In 'Bringing Words to Life', Beck, McKeown & Kucan talk about three tiers of words that students will be exposed to during school:

Most students come to school with a good tier 1 vocabulary. Those students who come from a 'word-rich' family, where they have been encouraged to read and have discussions about the world around them, will have a good tier 2 vocabulary. At school, they will be exposed to a growing number of tier 3 words, from the subject specialists that teach them. What about the students who come from a 'word-poor' background, where they haven't been encouraged to read and so haven't developed that more sophisticated tier 2 vocabulary? The classroom will be a daunting place for them.

Here's Dr Isabel Beck talking about tier 2 vocabulary:

Last week, Dr Brian Marsh and I visited some lessons around Durrington, across science, history and geography. Within the short period of time that we were in lessons, students were exposed to an array of different tier 2 and 3 words. For example:

This was in less than an hour. Multiply that up across 5 lessons a day, every day and it becomes clear what students are exposed to. This is great to see - students being exposed to and encouraged to use challenging academic vocabulary. We need to think about this though - those students who come from a 'word-rich' background will cope with this vocabulary well. Those that don't, will probably experience feelings of inadequacy and frustration, as their understanding of these words will be limited. This will be a serious block to their learning.

Fortunately, we saw teachers using a number of strategies in lessons to help their students understand this new vocabulary:

Deliberate multiple exposure to the new words during the lesson - including chanting the word and definition repeatedly in a science lesson!

Asking students to explain the definition of these words, in their own words.

As well as explicitly teaching the definition of the new word, following this up by questioning students about the correct use of the word in a sentence e.g. 'So, Trinity, how would you use 'biome' in a sentence?'

Discussing words that have a different meaning, that students might think have the same meaning e.g. heat and temperature.

Encouraging students to use academic language in their response e.g. 'Well done Sam, but instead of saying hot objects give off more infra-red radiation, what could you use instead of 'give off'?' Sam then thought about it and replied with 'emit'.

Discussing the derivation of words e.g. students had studied electrolysis before and knew that 'lysis' meant 'breaking down' so electrolysis effectively means using electcity to break down compounds. This was linked to 'plasmolysis' during osmosis i.e. the shrinking and possible rupture of a cell.

Teaching vocabulary like this can often be overlooked, but is so important. It's empowering for students and grows cultural capital. Put simply, it makes students feel clever.

Knowledge Organisers are a great way to support this, but more about that during our INSET day in November.
Further Reading
Posted by Shaun Allison

This entry was posted in General Teaching and tagged literacy, tier 2 and 3, Vocabulary. Bookmark the permalink.

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In 'Bringing Words to Life', Beck, McKeown & Kucan talk about three tiers of words that students will be exposed to during school: Most students come to school with a good tier 1 vocabulary. Those students who come from a 'word-rich' family, where they have been encouraged to read and have discussions about the world around...

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Building Vocabulary

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A very common phenomenon in many lessons is that students encounter new words. The way we approach this ought to be something teachers think about explicitly so that effective strategies are used. I've seen explicit vocabulary development done extremely well but, quite often, I find that it's approached in a rather shallow manner: new words are encountered, read out, discussed explained and maybe added to a list - but that's the end of it. A shallow approach often does not involve every student, does not involve everyone even saying the words aloud, let alone using them in a sentence or engaging in recall practice. There's a sense that new words are meant to sink in somehow after the briefest encounter.

I recently gave a talk at a CPD day for English teachers in Liverpool where I used this example. The words come from a session I attended by retired civil servant Michael Stark who is developing a phonics app for English learners in Africa and China. He used them to illustrate the power of phonics - choosing words that most of us would be unfamiliar with, therefore requiring us to use our phonetic knowledge instead of word recognition.

Here, I'm using them just as examples of new words. Imagine encountering these six words:

Stercoraceous

Sesquipedalian

Defervesence

Eucatastrophe

Commensalism

Prosopagnosia

If we want to say that students have learned these words, then they should be able to read them, say them, understand what they mean and use them appropriately in speech and in writing. They should also be able to recall them and use them appropriately at some point in the future, not just a few minutes after encountering them. This needs to apply to everyone in the class - obviously enough - but that's often where vocabulary development goes awry; teachers don't get into the corners of the room (metaphorically speaking) to make sure everyone knows them.

For each new word, some good choral repetition is very effective to start - to build confidence under cover of the chorus. Then, you need to cold call some individuals to say the words and explore the tricky parts of the pronunciation.

After reading the words, we need to explore their meaning, one word at a time. So, here you go - apologies if you knew them already:

Stercoraceous - consisting of or resembling dung or faeces.

Sesquipedalian - characterised by long words; long-winded.

Defervesence - the abatement of a fever (cease boiling)

Eucatastrophe - a sudden and favourable resolution; a happy ending.

Commensalism - two organisms; one benefits; the other derives neither benefit or harm

Prosopagnosia- inability to recognise faces of familiar people.

Crucially, after explaining each word at the appropriate level of detail it is important to check for understanding from the class, going back to the words without their explanations showing, to see if students can explain them - to you, to each other, with everyone involved. Too often, the odd student is involved here and the majority do not have their understanding checked. If you are teaching multiple words at once, then some scrambled word-to-meaning matching can be effective here. Multiple choice questions that include appropriate and inappropriate uses of new words can be very effective to tease out deeper understanding.

Now, let's see if students can use their new words in context. Here's an example where I have attempted to use all of our new words:

In a panic about his prosopagnosia , Tom scanned the room. He drew a blank as usual. Thank goodness; he could feel the defervesence after having eaten that stercoraceous porridge for breakfast.

He hoped for a degree of commensalism between himself and the audience - despite his habitual sesquipedalian delivery - and the usual eucatastrophe as he delivered the punchline.

Laughter. Relief. It was over.

Ok. So now we have given the words an airing. They are out there in the ether and probably written in books. But nobody has learned them. As the cognitive scientists say, learning requires forgetting - so we need to test for recall later with some retrieval practice. This is made more powerful if we are explicit with students that these are words they must know and that they will be tested on: spellings and meanings.

It might help to create a knowledge organiser for future retrieval practice by self-quizzing. Students can do this themselves - especially for words that emerge spontaneously - but it can pay to anticipate words and prepare good resources in advance. The question is: do the least confident students have the capacity to record the words and meanings accurately? If not, give them to them.

The final stage is to check in on these words some time later. A spelling test, words-to-meanings quiz, some multiple choice questions etc, probably mixed in with other words from previous new-word teaching episodes. Re-teach the common errors and then re-test again until everyone seems confident, each time using multiple cold calling to get a good sense of oral confidence with students saying the words correctly and appropriately.

If you compare this systematic disciplined approach with the more casual hit-and-hope approach mentioned at the beginning, it would require quite a change in some teachers' routine practice. There's a time investment required. However, I would suggest that this is how far we need to go, especially with high frequency words or critical technical words. I've found Y11 students who are not confident with words like photosynthesis, respiration, multiple, denominator, hydrochloric, chronological, parliament, gravitational. They usually recognise the words - they are familiar with them - and have a general sense of what they mean but their knowledge, understanding, fluency and recall haven't been tested systematically enough for the words to be really embedded; to be truly learned.

Ok. Quick quiz: Fill in the gaps: No cheating.

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Building Word Confidence: Everyone read, say, understand, use, practise.

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A very common phenomenon in many lessons is that students encounter new words. The way we approach this ought to be something teachers think about explicitly so that effective strategies are used. I've seen explicit vocabulary development done extremely well but, quite often, I find that it's approached in a rather shallow manner: new words are...