One of the biggest gaps we found in our students' knowledge both at GCSE and A Level was their confidence and ambition in reading more complex vocabulary and using it in their own writing and speech. We also found there was a lot of variation in students’ word knowledge and that this was potentially something we could have a substantial impact on in the classroom. We wanted to develop a common 'word hoard' which students could draw on as they moved towards GCSE to take on the challenge of unseen prose and poetry and get the most out of writing tasks too.
We were inspired in our planning by Alex Quigley's Closing The Vocabulary Gap and Doug Lemov's Reading Reconsidered, as well as the work of Rebecca Foster (@TLPMsF) in developing a new Key Stage 3 curriculum.
So we got to work planning lists of ambitious vocabulary! Our initial plan was to produce lists based around theme ie each week would be a different theme (Roget's Thesaurus style!): size, colour, light, smelliness and so on. What we quickly found was that this was the definitions ended up being very similar (imagine trying to write and remember different definitions for words with very similar meanings - noxious, noisome, malodorous, foul….!)
Instead we produced a list of 550 ambitious words which we wanted students to know well by the time they hit their GCSE years. We divided these up into 25 lists of 20 words. These were a mixture of academic Level 2 words (eg incorporate, essential), English-specific words (eg paradox, metaphor, irony) and interesting and enriching words (eg mottled, soapbox, bacchanalia).
The complete list is here.
The next challenge was to write definitions and exemplar sentences for each of the words. We divided the list into groups of twenty words and assigned each list to a Year 7 class to work on together in a collaborative spreadsheet. This was a pretty salutary lesson about the weaknesses of discovery learning - we have the most wonderful students in the world, but expecting them to come up with definitions and example sentences by themselves led to some VERY ropey results. So I had to go through all the lists to check for accuracy and precision, and I had to rewrite a lot of (most of) the sentences. It would perhaps have been much quicker to come up with them from scratch.
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| Here's what happened when the I recruited the students to write example sentences... lots of rewriting needed! |
We did our best from September to put into place a regular routine for classroom learning and independent study. Every Friday we email the list of words for the week to Year 7 and 8 students and their parents. The list has words, definitions, example sentences and cognate words. A sample list is here.
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| An extract of the weekly vocabulary list |
We also email a link to a Quizlet course for each week so that students can easily self quiz. The Quizlets are here. Our students love Quizlet - it isn't too gimmicky and because there are so many different ways to learn it feels like they are really in control.
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| The 'Match' game on Quizlet... |
The expectation is that all students will spend 30 minutes per week independently on vocabulary learning. Students are not be given any further English homework in Year 7 and 8 beyond vocabulary learning and independent reading.
Each week we also explicitly teach as many of the words as we can in the classroom (in practice this usually means 5-6 of the list of 20) - exploring etymology, collocation, differentiation from similar words etc. We also use Adam Boxer's 'retrieval roulette’ technique to set quick starter quizzes (example here).
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| The retrieval roulette quiz |
We also try to build the ambitious vocabulary into the classroom in other ways too - by using them as much as we can in teacher talk and in resources and by challenging students to use them in their written work and in their classroom talk - and rewarding them when they do so.
I have also been sharing the vocabulary lists with colleagues in other subjects and encouraging them to use them in their classrooms too. Colleagues have responded well to this and have even told me that they have learned new words themselves!
We are only half a term into the vocabulary learning programme - students have got 120 words under their belts and there are another 400 to go! The challenge now is for students to have developed a really strong knowledge of 200 words by Christmas and I am working on some creative ways of testing this in December. I will keep sharing updates here about how it goes.
