This academic year, over at Teach Secondary, I have the great pleasure of sharing a ‘Vocabulary Clinic’ article each month. It is a quick burst of vocabulary ideas and insights. You can find PDF copies freely available to download from my RESOURCES PAGE. I’m delighted to say that there
A version of this article was originally published in the excellent ‘Teach Secondary‘ magazine – you can subscribe HERE. It is well worth a read! Controversies and complaints about spelling are centuries old. In his Preface to ‘A Dictionary of the English Language’, in 1755, Samuel Johnson derided writers for their
In a couple of weeks, year 6 pupils will be sitting down to SATs examinations and in secondary schools, A Level and GCSE exams will start in earnest. Teachers everywhere are concentrating upon supporting our pupils to do their very best in challenging circumstances. Every teacher knows that the seeds
Words are all around us. They are legion, ubiquitous and omnipresent in our daily lives. They live in families, possess histories, slide and break into parts, and connect across worlds, separating and connecting us. And yet, curiously, few of us know how we acquire them, learn them, connect them, and
As a teacher who writes about the importance of literacy and vocabulary – and one who works with countless teachers across the country – I find myself talking repeatedly about the issue of the ‘word gap’ in our classrooms. Again and again, I am faced with the glaring examples of the problem
The ‘Frayer model‘ is a long-standing graphic organiser that has been deployed in classrooms with success for decades (it was first conceived Dorothy Frayer and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin). It is a simple but effective model to help students to organise their understanding of a new academic
‘‘We know too much to say we know too little, and we know too little to say that we know enough. Indeed, language is difficult to put into words.’’ Baumann, J. F. & Kameenui, E. J. (1991). ‘Research on vocabulary instruction: Ode to Voltaire’ We know a huge amount about
The web is full of websites on vocabulary: good, bad and ugly. Here are six of my favourite free vocabulary websites that I think are useful for teachers and students alike: 1. Describing Words This website has a simple premise: punch in a noun and you get countless descriptive words,
For a long time now I have been reading about vocabulary development. After teaching English Language and English Literature for over a decade and a half (including child language acquisition), I came to the stark realisation that I didn’t know enough about how children not only learnt to read,
A 10-year-old child who is a good reader will encounter something like 1 million words a year (around 12 novels), but crucially, approximately 20,000 of those words will prove unfamiliar (Oakhill et al. 2015). It is important then to support our pupils to develop an array of independent word
A lot of attention is rightly devoted by schools to address primary to secondary ‘transition’. We know that as children move schools it can prove a difficult move emotionally. Therefore, our focus, quite rightly, attends pastoral matters to offer vital support to our pupils. And yet, what if we a
“Stories are psychologically privileged in the human mind.” Daniel Willingham The mind thinks and remembers in stories. It is part of the architecture of human memory and our human experience. Given it is so rooted in how we think, storytelling proves vital to learning and is useful in all sorts