Vocabulary

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Ludvig Wittgenstein

A rich vocabulary is necessary for, and facilitative of academic success. It plays a key role in oral comprehension, reading comprehension and written languauge.

In high school, vocabulary is increasingly specialised, decontextualised and encountered less frequently. This means that it is unlikely that students will learn all the vocabulary they need from reading alone. Vocabulary instruction is, therefore, necessary.

As teachers, we can positively impact our learners' vocabularies. We can't teach all the words there are, but we can teach the Tier II academic instrucdtional words and Tier III subject discpline vocabulary that are critical for learner success. Instruction that provides memorable encounters with key words, opportunities to review and retrieve is most effective.

It is important that we construct topic word lists/lists of words that need our learners to know and that we directly teach and review them. These lists also provide powerful communication home. See the Rutherford College Tier 2 Academic Word List

Active Practice: The Key to Vocabulary - Teach Like a ChampionHow to shift to learning words by using them instead of guessing at them.

Effective vocabulary instruction - THE EDUCATION HUBThe importance of vocabulary knowledge and how to teach it in literacy programmes and across the curriculum.

Lots of Participation; Lots of Thinking: Highlights from Jen Brimming's Vocabulary Lesson - Teach Like a ChampionWe’re excited to share this fantastic video of Jen Brimming’s English lesson at Marine Academy Plymouth. Jen and her colleagues have been working hard to make their classrooms more energetic and dynamic across the school and have been focusing on adding Turn and Talk and Call and Response into their common methods of participation to support...

The Five ‘Keys’ to Reading - Five from FiveReading and literacy are perhaps the most researched aspects of education. Thousands of studies of the teaching of reading, and how children learn to read, have been published in scientific and academic journals and there are many reviews of the research literature. An extensive body of research on reading instruction has concluded that there are […]

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