“Education is the process of preparing us for the big world and the big world has big words. The more big words I know, the better I will survive in it. Because there are hundreds of thousands of big words in English, I cannot learn them all. But this does not mean that I shouldn’t try to learn some.”

Professor David Crystal, ​‘Words, Words, Words’

What is the EEF’s Vocabulary in Action poster?

Teaching vocabulary is hard! Harder than we might first imagine.

When we teach words, we need to balance teaching meaning (semantics), sound patterns (phonology) and how the word is written (orthography).

We also then think about how we make words memorable. In the classroom, we use different strategies to move our pupils from initial engagements with word meanings, to deeper processing of often multiple meanings, with different texts.

We seek out ways to allow pupils to use these words in discussion and in their own writing, across curriculum areas.

There’s lots of evidence out there in relation to what works in the classroom. For vocabulary, many of these strategies are described in the EEF’s suite of literacy guidance reports here.

Sometimes, the vast evidence around successful literacy instruction can be overwhelming!

The EEF’s Vocabulary in Action poster offers a straightforward, simple summary of key techniques we can use to develop our approaches to direct vocabulary teaching.

A Common Classroom Conundrum

Let’s look at this common conundrum from a Year 5 teacher’s classroom:

For teachers like Ms Chowdhury, once we’ve identified the words we want to teach our children, what do we do with them?

The techniques suggested in the Vocabulary in Action poster break down the research evidence into concrete, practical, and easy-to-remember strategies.

These techniques are based on the robust approaches recommended by Beck and McKeown in their book, Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction.

How do I use this resource?

For teachers, this poster offers ways in which we might easily build varied, purposeful vocabulary activities into our lessons. Teachers might find it helpful to use these techniques alongside wider evidence-informed pedagogies such as retrieval tasks or high-quality modelling.

For leaders, this poster could be used to break down and name vocabulary teaching techniques for staff training. Leaders might find it helpful to consider these techniques alongside wider curriculum design and tiered vocabulary approaches, to support vocabulary teaching across different subject contexts.

No poster can perfectly encapsulate all the complexities of teaching language! For more detail, take a look at this blog on vocabulary and reading. Check out, too, the EEF’s podcast discussing the challenges and opportunities in teaching vocabulary.

Download our literacy guidance reports here.

References

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G. and Kucan, L. (2013) Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, New York: Guildford Press