You get six chances to guess the word of the day. The word is always five letters long, and, after each guess, the colour of the tiles indicate how close your guess was to the word.
This is Wordle: the new vocabulary game that has captured people’s attention since the start of the year. A quick scroll through Twitter shows that teachers are no exception.
Vocabulary games are nothing new in education: indeed, many teachers use them regularly to develop students’ literacy. And as Wordle grows in popularity, it’s likely that it, too, will soon feature in teaching and learning.
But should it? Just how effective are games like Wordle in building literacy skills and closing the vocabulary gap?
Alex Quigley, national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation, a former teacher and author of Closing the Reading Gap, believes that vocabulary games do have a place in the classroom. However, he admits that there is no distinct evidence to support this.
“Often, when we’re looking for evidence, we want specificity; for example, ‘Does Wordle help improve vocabulary?’, but we don’t get that with vocabulary because vocabulary itself is such a big cumulative thing; it develops over time, it develops from lots of different directions,” he says.
Vocabulary games: Can Wordle help in teaching literacy?
“This makes it quite hard to isolate what caused development and to assess it. So while there’s no direct research on ‘word games make X difference’, I think there are useful inferences we can make about word games.”
We can draw these inferences, he says, from the research about the importance of “word consciousness” in developing vocabulary. Word consciousness is a curiosity or an interest in words. To activate this, pupils can be taught about a word’s history, root, spelling pattern, links and connection with other words.
This, Quigley says, is where vocabulary games can have a brilliant impact. When pupils learn vocabulary in a fun, fast-paced activity, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated to learn.
“These games are an important part of ongoing, high-quality teaching,” he says.
And although the word “game” can be a red flag to some in education, who may be worried about the “gamification of the curriculum”, Quigley points out that word games can be compared with the use of regular low-stakes testing.
“If you see testing more broadly, and include quick quizzes, you can see how testing can be positive. It’s the same with games: there are gains in terms of engagement, interest, finding connections and tackling a topic in a new way, which is really positive,” he explains.
As well as piquing students’ interest, these sorts of games are great for breaking up long periods of intense work, adds Quigley. After half an hour of extended writing, for example, a quick 10-minute vocabulary game can re-energise pupils.
“We know engagement matters and that motivation, fostered through these games, can then keep pupils’ going through difficult tasks,” he says.
However, there’s a balance to strike here: the games can’t be so engaging that they overtake learning.
“Most of these strategies are concise and quick-paced, so teachers need to look at the rhythm of the lesson when deciding when to use them,” Quigley says. “The games do result in learning, but it’s different to the hard slog of writing for long periods of time.”
To work well in a lesson, a vocabulary game needs to be short and sharp, without being too distracting, then. But what other elements should it contain?
Quigley says that you can get a good indication of whether or not a game will help vocabulary learning by considering whether it focuses on morphology, which he says is “right at the heart of what the evidence would indicate is good for vocabulary development”.
It’s also a good sign if a game encourages students to make connections between words. He gives the example of Word Trees, whereby students are asked to generate as many words as possible from the root of a word like “photo” or “cap”.
“Students need to be asking questions about words, they need to be making connections, they need to think about inference,” Quigley says. “If pupils are going to do well in their Sats, for example, they need to make lots of inferences from words and phrases, and they need layers of understanding. Any game which gets you thinking about layers of meaning, spelling patterns, word roots and word families is likely to be a good thing.”
So with that in mind, does Wordle fit the bill? Well, not exactly. While it could help pupils to learn spelling patterns, Quigley says that it could be less effective than other games when it comes to vocabulary.
“Using Wordle wouldn’t dumb down the curriculum, but it’s unlikely to have the powerful ingredients we’re talking about for the vocabulary: the connections, for example,” he says. “While there are other games that are a bit more wasteful, equally there are games that are more helpful.”
So, which vocabulary games would Quigley recommend? The first that springs to his mind is Pass the Bomb, in which students take it in turns to generate a word from a word root, while passing a timer around. In this game, no one wants to be left holding the timer - aka “the bomb” - when it goes off.
Quigley has developed his own games, too. He highlights Connect 4, in which students are given four words - for example, “extinction”, “evolution”, “variation” and “conservation” - and have a set amount of time to seek out as many connections between them as possible.
In his own teaching, he says he also used Thesaurus Sprints a lot: if students are discussing a piece of text, for example, and a character is feeling sad, they are given two minutes to “sprint” through the thesaurus and find a synonym for “sad”.
All of these examples have morphology at the centre: the key ingredient for an effective vocabulary game. When it comes to Wordle, however, perhaps it’s best left for you to complete alone, with a cup of tea before school.
