Recently, I sat down with my seven-year-old boy, Noah, to guide him through a typical reading task for his homework: reading Katje the Windmill Cat. When faced with unfamiliar vocabulary, like “ground grain”, “miller”, “Dutch” and “prowled”, Noah was dumbfounded. Without the background knowledge, and the words to access the world of the text, he simply couldn’t comprehend what he was reading.
What struck me, as it has countless times in my classroom, was the central importance of vocabulary knowledge, in reading, and how our knowledge of the world is bound to the breadth and depth of our own vocabulary. Indeed, the academic language of school is so essential to all learning, that it can prove invisible in plain sight to even the most skilled of teachers and supportive parents.
In her article in the 6 July issue of Tes, renowned secondary English consultant Barbara Bleiman chastised those teachers who were concentrating on the "vocabulary gap" so evident in our classrooms. And yet, the voice of teachers rings loud and clear about the issue. In the recent Oxford University Press national report, Why Closing the Word Gap Matters (cited by Bleiman), it was revealed that nearly half of all teachers, both primary (49 per cent) and secondary (43 per cent), expressed their worry that a “limited vocabulary” was evident at Year 1 and in Year 7 respectively, and it was negatively affecting their learning.
My classroom experience, and my countless conversations with primary school teachers and secondary teachers of a host of different subjects, over the last two years has confirmed this issue. With the advent of the new, more challenging curriculum, the issue has been revealed to teachers more visibly than ever before. Stories like Katje the Windmill Cat are being read by children at an ever-younger age. Though vocabulary is not the only barrier to comprehension, it is the most visible and it is indeed vital.
Bleiman rightly questions what would prove a dubious practice of learning word lists, or encouraging verbose offerings from swallowing the dictionary. And yet, I suspect her expertise obscures the reality stated by teachers. Is “vocabulary the answer to everything?” she asks. I suspect countless thousands of teachers would say "of course not". But then, each teacher would say, as would I, "but it really matters, and it is a great place to start".
No teacher would dispute that reading is a “complex and multi-faceted activity”. So why would any expert deny teachers the practical starting point of better understanding vocabulary as a vital thread in the reading rope? Vocabulary does not inhibit “bigger aims” of education, it does the opposite – it helps us understand them better. It is a first step in grappling with a complex issue, shrinking the problem down to a size that is manageable for teachers.
I have had the privilege of speaking to countless teachers, most of them non-English teachers without a degree in linguistics, and they have expressed their delight in learning much more about vocabulary – how it is received, understood and best used – and, particularly, the unique academic language of school.
Practical teaching approaches to teaching new or unfamiliar words, from understanding words in useful ‘tiers’ (taken from the brilliantly helpful work of Isabel Beck and colleagues), graphic organisers, etymology, morphology, and many more evidence-informed approaches, are being taken up by teachers across the country who are wanting their pupils to better access the new, harder curriculum.
Rather than proving an unhealthy “obsession” with vocabulary, as unhelpfully posed by Bleiman, teachers are adding new strings to their teaching bow. They are grappling with the tricky problems for their most disadvantaged of children and they are improving their practice. From words that we learn in stories of windmills – to waves in GCSE science, or weather in geography – a focus on words is a gateway to a deep and essential knowledge of the world for our children.
Alex Quigley is an English teacher at Huntington School, and the author of the bestselling book for teachers Closing the Vocabulary Gap. You can read the Barbara Bleiman feature in the 6 July issue of Tes here.
