Hello my name is Jean Gross and I am the former government Communication Champion for

Children.

I’m going to talk about what we know from research about developing children’s vocabulary, and
what that means for teaching and learning.

Vocabulary does seem to be the key predictor of academic attainment. For example, there is a five
year gap in reading comprehension between teenagers who had a good vocabulary at age six, and
those with a limited vocabulary. Vocabulary at age 13 is a better predictor of success in GCSE English
Literature and Maths than pupil disadvantage. And children’s long term life chancers are influenced
too; children with poor vocabularies at age five were found to be twice as likely to be unemployed in
their thirties, and one and a half times more likely to have mental health difficulties, than those with
a good vocabulary – after controlling for other factors that might have led to this association.

The research on how best to develop vocabulary falls into two broad categories. One is research on
general adult-child interactions, and the other is research on the explicit teaching of vocabulary.

So looking first at adult-child interaction, we know that children learn best from back-and forth
conversations and from hearing lots of different words. So for example as a teacher, instead of
saying ‘Oh dear I’ve left the door open’ you might say ‘I’ve left the door ajar’. It’s particularly
importance to use and explain complex vocabulary with disadvantaged children, because studies
have found that teachers working in poorer areas are less likely to explain sophisticated words than
teachers working in better-off areas.

Another research-based tip is to use the ‘expansion’ or ‘add a word’ strategy, where you reflect back
what a child has said but add some new vocabulary. So if a child says ‘Wow - look at that whale’
about a picture, you say ‘Yes it’s a giant blue whale, I think, swimming in the ocean’. If a child
complains that an adult was ‘going on at me’, you expand that to say ‘Oh she was going on at you,
criticising you?’

Now let’s look at deliberate vocabulary teaching. You may think that children can best develop their
vocabulary through extensive independent reading. But while we do learn new words from reading,
we need to be able to decode and understand 95% of words in any passage in order to be able to
deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar word from context. Many children just can’t do this. Reading
aloud to children, however, is a sure-fire way to build their vocabulary and we should do this every
day.

We also need to teach vocabulary explicitly. Isobel Beck’s research helps us here; she has shown that
we should focus on teaching what she calls ‘Tier 2’ words. These are the important words that are
not typical in everyday talk, nor highly topic-specific, but which will be used frequently across the
school curriculum. You’ll learn more about these words during this course.

When teaching these words, children benefit from discussing child-friendly definitions rather than
just relying on those given in dictionaries. When children themselves explain their own definitions,
they make greater gains in word learning.

Also helpful is analysing a word into component parts- root word, prefixes, suffixes. This is called
morphology. So for example, ‘bene’ in the word benevolent is also found in words like beneficial and
benefit. Teaching that ‘bene’ means ‘well’ can help children unlock meanings beyond the immediate
word you are focusing on
Looking at examples and non-examples of the word, sometimes called semantic mapping, has also
been found to work. If children were thinking about the word ‘sleek’, for example, you might ask
them to discuss whether ‘porcupine’ is an example or non-example of something sleek, then ask
about ‘duck’, ‘sports car’, ‘hairbrush’, or ‘hair’.

Finally, we need to draw on research on memory to help us teach vocabulary. It has been found that
children need between four and ten exposures to a new word before they will remember it. So they
will need multiple opportunities to hear and use a new word in the classroom rather than one-off
teaching. And they will need to revisit words previously taught, through games and quizzes, at
progressively longer intervals – at the end of the lesson, at the end of the day, later in the week,
later in the half term, and at the end of term and year.

So that has been a quick look at some key research. I hope you’ve found it helpful, and that you
enjoy the rest of the course.