Closing the Vocabulary Gap

Alex Quigley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351624534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As teachers grapple with the challenge of a new, bigger and more challenging school curriculum, at every key stage and phase, success can feel beyond our reach. But what if there were 50, 000 small solutions to help us bridge that gap?

In Closing the Vocabulary Gap, the author explores the increased demands of an academic curriculum and how closing the vocabulary gap between our 'word poor' and 'word rich' students could prove the vital difference between school failure and success.

This must-read book presents the case for teacher-led efforts to develop students' vocabulary and provides practical solutions for teachers across the curriculum, incorporating easy-to-use tools, resources and classroom activities.

1	Closing the vocabulary gap Problems and solutions

The ways of words, of knowing and loving words, is a way to the essence of things, and to the essence of knowing.

John Donne

How many words do you know?

It can prove a startling question. Though we use words all day long when talking, and in reading and writing, we seldom pay much heed to their importance or ask such questions. We have all accumulated a vast store of vocabulary that is so integral to who we are that we barely notice it. Though we are indeed experts with words, we underestimate how many words we know.

If I said that the typical vocabulary of readers of this book would be something around 50,000 to 60,000 words,¹ would that surprise you?

We are surrounded by a vast wealth of words and they profoundly affect our lives – words we use and receive, hear and speak. From the cradle to the dinner table, the classroom to the boardroom, our wealth of words can determine our status in life. With well over a million words stuffed into the English language, we cannot know them all, but with a greater awareness of words – their rich and complex meanings, uses and even abuses – we can help our students develop something like the word-hoard of 50,000 words they need to thrive in school and beyond.^2,3,4

Many a politician has been heard promising to ‘close the gap’ of social inequality, but seldom can we credit them for doing so. The gaps between the rich and poor in our society are long lasting and deep rooted, with few policies appearing to mitigate the damaging effects for those children who live in poverty. The problem appears too massive and complex, so we voice our concerns and try to make sure our democratic vote counts. In schools, though we cannot bring an end to poverty, we cannot wait for poverty to end either. Instead, we can shrink the complex issues that beset the most vulnerable children in our care and share something that would appear to be insignificant, but what can prove comprehensible, manageable and ultimately transformative for them. We can share with our students a wealth of words.

There are then thousands of small solutions to the damaging inequalities that we observe in our society and in our classrooms, and they can be found in the English dictionary. By closing the vocabulary gaps for children in our classrooms with their peers, we can offer them the vital academic tools for school success, alongside the capability to communicate with confidence in the world beyond the school gates.

We know that a great deal of our vocabulary is learned incidentally and implicitly outside of those gates. This largely subconscious, hidden growth is like a child’s physical development. If you are a parent or carer for a child, you barely notice the daily growth, but over time, the size differences are unmistakable. By paying attention to vocabulary growth at the micro level, we can better understand it. If we better understand it, we can go to work cultivating it and in so doing every child will be gifted a wealth of words.

By simply recognising the value of attending to ­vocabulary development, we can make a start on closing the gaps that exist in our classrooms. Recognition is a first step, but to address the well documented ‘attainment gaps’ in our schools and classrooms we need to attend to the vocabulary gaps. It is no silver-bullet solution to improving all educational outcomes for our children, but as E. D. Hirsch Jr, notes, vocabulary size is a good proxy for school success, and therefore it proves a good place for us to start:

Vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities – not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, but also general knowledge of science, history and the arts.

A wealth of words, by E. D. Hirsch Jr⁵

More than just words

Viewing vocabulary as a proxy for learning, or the reading process, is often criticised as being reductive. The play ‘Hamlet’ is of course much more than the sum of its 30,557 words. And yet, it offers us a way to cut to the quick of the complexity of a child reading a play, or indeed talking like a scientist, or writing like a historian. It can make things simpler for busy teachers, but not simplistic.

We know that too many students fail to access the reading that is integral to the academic curriculum of school. In the face of this failure, closing the vocabulary gap between children’s personal word-hoard and the academic vocabulary of school is a realistic, realisable goal. With new, bigger and harder qualifications at every key stage, the demands of academic vocabulary have only increased. From a child who struggles with a textbook in science, to the students simply giving up in an exam, experiencing a vocabulary knowledge deficit in school can prove an insurmountable hurdle.

There is a huge amount of evidence to prove that the vocabulary gap begins early, before children even attend school. It then typically widens throughout their time at school, too often hardening into failure at GCSE level and beyond for word-poor children. Evidence shows that, alongside socio-economic status, vocabulary is one of the significant factors that proved relevant to children achieving an A* to C grade in mathematics, English language and English literature.⁶ Such achievement, and the failures that are associated with a limited vocabulary, are inextricably linked to a child’s home postcode, along with the pay packet and level of academic qualification of their parents.⁷

The evidence of the vocabulary gap proving a crucial factor for school success is comprehensive, but we have not yet properly addressed the issue in our schools. With the new curriculum seeing many children in tears sitting their SATs reading examination in primary school,⁸ as well as students in secondary school grappling with more demanding qualifications at GCSE, the issue of literacy and children actually accessing the full breadth of the curriculum is hitting home more than ever.

Are we missing the seemingly small, but potent solutions to the issue of accessing an academic curriculum?

Back in the 1990s, researchers Hart and Risley⁹ studied in detail the linguistic lives of 42 families in the United States. After recording the communication between parents and their children (aged between 7 months and 3 years) over a period of 30 months, they shone a light on some shocking findings:

From birth to 48 months, parents in professional families spoke 32 million more words to their children than parents in welfare families, and this talk gap between the ages of 0 and 3 year – not parent education, socioeconomic status, or race – explains the ­vocabulary and language gap at age 3 and the reading and math achievement gap aged 10.

The achievement gap in reading, edited by Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels, p. 151¹⁰

The vocabulary gap starts early and is more significant than most people would ever consider. The gargantuan statistic of a 30-million word gap should give us pause. Though this does not mean that every family living in material poverty sees children predestined to have an impoverished vocabulary, it does reveal that we should attend to word gaps wherever they may appear.

This relatively small Hart and Risley study has since been replicated with larger groups of children, with voice-recording technology like the ‘language environment analysis system (LENA)’, being utilised to collate a vast store of 112,000 hours of recordings from more than 750 children. The evidence reiterates the findings that university educated parents talk more to their children than less educated parents and that such talk correlates with later language ability. There are exceptions to such stories that we should seek out, but the trends run deep in our society and they become writ large in depressing statistics about social mobility, or the lack thereof, in England.

The evidence on vocabulary gaps beginning early and proving a crucial factor in later school success stacks up. Evidence has shown that vocabulary size at 25 months accounted for linguistic and cognitive skills at aged 8.¹¹ Researchers have established the link between orally tested vocabulary at the end of the first year at school in the United States (between 5 and 7 years old) as a significant predictor of reading comprehension 10 years later.¹² The vital importance of talk and language development in the early years is clear. Any politician who talks about the importance of ‘social mobility’ should begin with early years provision and language development.

For every teacher, parent and politician, the evidence about the importance of vocabulary should prove essential reading. Another research study, the ‘British Cohort Study’, compared the vocabulary skills of thousands of 5-year-olds across a range of social groups, following the group from 1970 and then into their 30s. What were the findings? Predictably, children with a restricted vocabulary at 5 years old were more likely to be poor readers as adults, experience higher unemployment rates and even have more mental health issues.¹³ It was also clear from this evidence that children from disadvantaged backgrounds could recognise and name fewer pictures than their more advantaged peers.

Consider that fact for a moment: these ‘word poor’ children are left unable to describe their world. For our children then, the limits of their vocabulary really do prove the limits of their world. The evidence is stark and sobering. Though teachers’ influences are limited to the classroom, we can still help children better develop a vast store of words and unlock the vital academic vocabulary of school.

For every child to leave school with a word-hoard of something like 50,000 words should be our aim. With all of their rich complexity and depth, words make us who we are, and they help us become who we could be. We should want every child under our care to be able to recognise every picture they see, to write their lives, read about their lived reality and to speak into life their very hopes and dreams.

The vocabulary gap and the academic curriculum

School children in England face the significant challenges of a new curriculum. The matter of a bigger, harder curriculum is of course multi-faceted, with many time-poor teachers feeling disillusioned and without the requisite training to face the issue of helping every child succeed. By defining the problem of the academic challenge more precisely, we can make a start of finding specific solutions.

In 2016, the educational news was awash with anguished tales of stude...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Closing the vocabulary gap: problems and solutions
• 2 What every teacher needs to know about reading
• 3 What is in a word? know your roots
• 4 Wot d’ya mean by academic vocabulary?
• 5 Developing vocabulary and ‘disciplinary literacy’
• 6 We need to talk about spelling
• 7 Practical strategies for closing the vocabulary gap
• 8 Next steps
• Appendix 1: A list of common Latin loan words, or words with Latin roots, in the English language
• Appendix 2: Latin roots related to the human body, people and groups
• Appendix 3: The 100 most commonly used words in the English language (from the 2.1 billion words in the Oxford English Corpus)
• Appendix 4: Avril Coxhead’s full 570-word ‘Academic Word List’
• Bibliography
• Index