We need to talk about: explicitly teaching vocabulary

Why is vocabulary fundamental to student progression in all subjects? How can a coordinated, whole-school approach strengthen vocabulary acquisition for all learners?

What percentage of words do you think a reader needs to know before they can understand a text? Would 70 or 80% be enough for them to get the gist?

Let’s start at 80%. How accessible is the following text for you?

For those of us with strong reading skills, the multiple nonsense words here will pose frequent distractions, but we are likely to be able to get a rough gist of what is happening. The same might be said of any learner we put this kind of text in front of: they may get ‘the gist’.

But what happens when you start posing your retrieval questions? What is the ‘flid’ and why isn’t it ‘weafling’?

Research says that for a learner to independently read and comprehend a text, they must know 98% of the words used: no more than 2 in 100 words should be unknown (Carver, 1994). Beyond this, the text becomes difficult to understand without support.

It is generally accepted that by the end of secondary school, most children will have a working vocabulary made up of around 20,000+ words. However, research also tells us that learners reach secondary school with widely varying vocabulary sizes (Biemiller, 2003), and that these differences tend to persist throughout school if they are not specifically addressed.

Download the guide below for some tips on how to teach vocabulary and reading in secondary schools to maximise comprehension.

References

• Biemiller, A. (2003). Vocabulary: Needed if more children are to read well. Reading Psychology, 24(3-4), 323–335.
• Carver, R. P. (1994). Percentage of Unknown Vocabulary Words in Text as a Function of the Relative Difficulty of the text: Implications for Instruction. Journal of Reading Behavior, 26(4), 413-437.