Closing the language gap: Building vocabulary
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/literacy-2 ... ment-23078
And while we’re trying, it might also be worth putting a vocabulary building programme in place. Many schools have a word of the week or word of the day in operation, but how do they choose what words to focus on?
Vocabulary can be usefully divided into 3 tiers:
Tier 1 – high frequency in spoken language (table, slowly, write, horrible)
Tier 2 – high frequency in written texts (gregarious, beneficial, required, maintain)
Tier 3 – subject specific, academic language (osmosis, trigonometry, onomatopoeia)
We don’t need to worry about tier 1 – pupils usually arrive knowing the basics and if not they will quickly pick them up in conversation with their peers. And we’re pretty good at recognising pupils won’t know Tier 3 words – these are our subject-specific key words. But Tier 2 vocabulary presents a problem – because we read these will be words that are so familiar to us that we don’t notice pupils won’t know them. But these are usually words that pupils will already have a conceptual understand of, even though they’re unfamiliar with the vocabulary.