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Teaching vocabulary in secondary English

Which words to teach, how many, and how to make them last beyond the lesson. The EEF calls the evidence on how best to teach vocabulary relatively limited, but what there is points one way: a few words at a time, chosen with care, used at once and brought back.

Long read · 8 minute read

Lesson 3 of our A Christmas Carol scheme gives ten minutes to new words and a paragraph of Dickens. The lesson plan says: “Pre-teach covetous, flint and solitary. Read the extract aloud while students follow.” The extract is the narrator’s first description of Scrooge, 117 words long. The lesson explains seven words in it: four taught as vocabulary (covetous, flint, solitary and self-contained) and three glossed (grindstone, rime and dog-days).

Seven words in 117 is a fair picture of the problem. A GCSE set text is full of words students have not met, and a lesson can teach only a few of them. The decisions for an English department are which few, and what happens to them after the lesson.

What the EEF recommends

The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report Improving literacy in secondary schools (2019) gives vocabulary its second recommendation: “Provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject”. Its summary says that “Teachers in every subject should provide explicit vocabulary instruction to help students access and use academic language” and that “Teachers should prioritise teaching Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary, which students are unlikely to encounter in everyday speech.” It also says who should choose: “Teachers and subject leaders should consider which words and phrases to teach as part of curriculum planning.”

The full report is candid about the evidence. Its list of approaches begins: “While there is relatively limited evidence about how best to teach vocabulary explicitly”. The approaches it calls promising include work on word roots and prefixes, and “regular low-stakes assessment, such as quizzes, to provide multiple exposures to complex subject specific vocabulary, before applying this vocabulary in use”. It wants both kinds of learning: “rich oral and written language environments (with opportunities for implicit learning)” alongside “directly teaching vocabulary (explicit learning)”.

Three tiers of words

The tiers come from Isabel Beck and her co-authors McKeown and Kucan. In Bringing Words to Life (2002) they describe Tier One as “the most basic words”, such as clock and happy, “rarely requiring instruction in school”. Tier Two words are “high-frequency words for mature language users”, such as coincidence and absurd. Tier Three words are “words whose frequency of use is quite low, often being limited to specific domains”, such as isotope and peninsula, and they are “probably best learned when needed in a content area”. The EEF report uses the same model, with examine and establish among its Tier 2 examples and photosynthesis for Tier 3.

In English, Tier 3 holds two different kinds of word. One is the subject terms students use in essay after essay: simile, soliloquy, allegory, dramatic irony. The other is the rare word a passage needs once. Flint in Lesson 3 is one. Dudgeon (the handle of a dagger) and gouts (large drops) in Lesson 8 of our Macbeth scheme are two more: students need them to read “And on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood”, and few will meet either word again. The subject terms are worth teaching properly and using every week. The rare words need explaining, and then they can go.

Most of the teaching time should go to Tier 2: covetous, solitary, benevolence, neglected, callous, indifference. These are the words a student needs to describe a character precisely, and they turn up in other books. The same chapter has a warning about numbers that fits a lesson plan: “there needs to be some basis for limiting the number of words so that students will have the opportunity to learn some words well.”

Taught words and read words

The Key Stage 3 programme of study asks for both routes. Students should understand challenging texts through “learning new vocabulary, relating it explicitly to known vocabulary and understanding it with the help of context and dictionaries”, and build their own language by “drawing on new vocabulary and grammatical constructions from their reading and listening, and using these consciously in their writing and speech to achieve particular effects”.

A few words a lesson, taught well, is a small share of the words students meet. The rest come from reading and talk, which is one more reason to read whole texts at a good pace and to keep students reading for pleasure. Oxford University Press has published a series of Oxford Language Reports on what it calls the word gap, from Why Closing the Word Gap Matters (2018) to Building Children’s Vocabulary (2023). OUP describes the 2020 edition, Bridging the Word Gap at Transition, as “Detailing the impact of a language gap when moving from Primary to Secondary school and the effects of school shutdowns on vocabulary.”

Spacing applies to words as much as to anything else. The EEF’s 2021 review of cognitive science in the classroom found some evidence that spacing learning over time can improve it, and the spacing studies it summarised “covered several different subject areas including reading and vocabulary, science, and maths.”

What Ofsted saw in English departments

Ofsted’s 2024 English report, Telling the story, found secondary schools identifying vocabulary but not always teaching it in a way that lasts. “Sometimes, this vocabulary is less well defined and the focus is on learning individual words in isolation, as opposed to embedding a rich vocabulary in context, which allows pupils to think, speak and write about the subject and to create their own complex compositions.” The result: “This leads to pupils learning words in a decontextualised way that does not allow them to see them in action or add them to their own vocabulary.”

On recap, it was pointed: “Words, such as unfamiliar vocabulary or character names, are linked to schemes of work and often form part of the initial recap in lessons. But this is not always effective in developing pupils’ rich knowledge of vocabulary when schools have not considered the connections between units or how they grow in complexity.” That is a fair challenge to any Do Now, ours included. The schools Ofsted singled out had planned further ahead: “Planning includes details of when and how to approach new words, what opportunities there are to revisit them over time and how assessment can explicitly check where they are being used in pupils’ work.”

Word parts

The EEF’s summary says that “Effective approaches, including those related to etymology and morphology, will help students remember new words and make connections between words.” The full report gives un- and re- as examples of prefixes. The set texts supply plenty of material. In Stave 4 of A Christmas Carol the dead man lies “plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for”, and our workbook points out the three un- words in a row, where un- means not. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” uses the other un-, the one that takes something away, and the Macbeth workbook explains it that way. Two meanings of one prefix, one from each text, make a short lesson in themselves.

How our lessons do it

  • Every lesson apart from the end-of-unit assessment and feedback lessons teaches three to five words, almost always four, in the Know phase before the reading, each with a definition written for a 14-year-old. In Lesson 3 solitary is “alone, without company”.
  • The words get used straight away. Lesson 3’s exploded quotation is “solitary as an oyster”, the teacher’s notes zoom in on solitary, the model paragraph uses it, and the Securing word bank repeats it with its definition.
  • Do Nows bring words back. Lesson 4 asks “What does covetous mean?” In Lesson 13, ten lessons after solitary was taught, the Do Now asks what it means. In Macbeth, Lesson 3 asks “What does the word prophecy mean?” a lesson after it was taught.
  • Some words return as vocabulary in later lessons when the play needs them again: hallucination in Lessons 8, 13 and 21 of the Macbeth scheme, and equivocation in Lessons 15 and 21.
  • Each Feedback Loop kit has a section headed Words to use in your paragraph, with ten words to describe (Tier 2) and ten terms to analyse (Tier 3), and students must use at least two of them in the paragraph they write. The first A Christmas Carol kit lists isolated, solitary, aloof, indifferent and callous among its words to describe.

The texts help. Dickens uses solitary in three staves: “solitary as an oyster” in Stave 1, “A solitary child, neglected by his friends” in Stave 2 and “a solitary lighthouse” in Stave 3. Neglected comes back at the “neglected grave” in Stave 4. Shakespeare’s Porter talks about an “equivocator” in Act 2 Scene 3, and in Act 5 Scene 5 Macbeth begins “To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend, That lies like truth”. A word taught once is met again in the reading, and the second meeting does some of the teaching.

What we would do

  • Choose three to five words a lesson. Most should be Tier 2 words the text uses and students will need again; add the subject term the lesson’s analysis needs.
  • Explain rare words in passing and do not test them.
  • Give each taught word a definition a 14-year-old understands and an example from the text, then use it straight away in the reading, the analysis and the writing.
  • Plan where each Tier 2 word comes back: a Do Now in the next lesson, another a few weeks later, and a writing task that asks for it.
  • Ask students to use words as well as define them. A Do Now can ask for one sentence about Scrooge with covetous in it.
  • Teach the prefixes and roots the text hands you: un- in Stave 4 and in Act 1 Scene 5, or the -cide in regicide, which the first lesson of our Macbeth scheme defines as the killing of a king.
  • Keep students reading. Teaching can reach a few words a lesson, and reading reaches the rest.

Sources

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