Vital Vocabulary: putting research evidence to work

Charlotte Caldwell, ELE and part of the English Development Team at Front Lawn Primary Academy, reflects on how using the evidence from the EEF helped develop the teaching of vocabulary across the school.

Navigating your way through a sea of evidence can be a daunting task, but it can reap real rewards for our pupils – helping us to make meaningful improvements to teaching and learning.

But, when considering evidence, it is important to get beneath the surface of it; to focus on the ​‘how’ as well as the ​‘what’. Asking questions such as, do the principles that underpin this approach – and made it effective in other settings – mean it could be impactful in mine?

Before deciding on a strategy to improve vocabulary teaching across our primary school, we made sure to read widely.

Throughout this exploration phase, it was important to keep questioning and critically assessing the research. We were careful to safeguard against ​“cherrypicking” evidence that confirmed our preconceived ideas about what best practice might look like, interrogating sources thoroughly to make sure we identified the best way forward.

Reviewing the research evidence and refining our plan

After reviewing the EEFs Teaching and Learning Toolkit and Improving Literacy guidance reports, we came to wonder whether our children were exposed to a variety of rich language regularly enough, and if our vocabulary teaching was explicit and consistent.

As educators we are aware that while pupils may be able to decode words accurately, they can only fully understand these words if:

• they are already in their vocabulary,
• they have had repeated exposure to them,
• they have been taught how to use them in new and varied contexts.

With this in mind, we created an implementation plan that would support and guide us in improving the teaching of vocabulary across the whole primary phase. As a team, (members of SLT and lead teachers from each phase) we decided that we needed to put in place a more structured way of introducing new vocabulary, and ensure that this was applied consistently across the whole school.

We decided to start with identifying tier 2 vocabulary, and plotting out the sequencing of when it ought to be taught. Then, we developed a consistent script for how it ought to be introduced.

We monitored our progress by looking at how children’s vocabulary developed – the range of words they were able to use verbally and in their writing – across a range of different age groups. An unforeseen consequence of the teacher’s increased focus on vocabulary emerged.