How To Select Key Vocabulary For Your Subject's Curriculum
- Aidan Severs
- Sep 22
- 6 min read
We all know vocabulary is important.
Having a good vocabulary is important for the future:
"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. 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." - A. Quigley, 'Closing the Vocabulary Gap'
"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 parents’ education, socioeconomic status, or race – explains the vocabulary and language gap at age 3 and the reading and maths achievement gap aged 10." - 'The Achievement Gap in Reading', 2017, Edited by Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels – Routledge, p151
"Children with a restricted vocabulary at 5 years old were likely to be poor readers as adults, experience higher unemployment rates and even have more mental health issues." - Law et al (2009) 'Modelling developmental language difficulties'
I could go on, but you get the picture. Not only is vocabulary important later on, it is important now.
Words are the building blocks of all learning. If we don't know what individual words mean, we won't understand the meaning of the phrases and sentences that they make up. Whether we read or hear information, we need to understand the meanings of individual words to truly understand the information we are receiving.
Knowing The Meaning OF Enough Words To Understand A Text
But what percentage of words in a text do children need to know in order to understand the whole text?
What if a child only understood 75% of the words needed in a text? Try it for yourself: can you name the process being described here?
What about with 95% of the words?
We need to know about 95% of word meanings to be able to understand a piece of text. It is the most pertinent words in academic texts that are typically unknown to poor readers - we must teach children these words.
How Many Words Should We Teach?
Alex Quigley summarises some of the excellent content of the first chapter of his book 'Closing the vocabulary Gap':
"By explicitly teaching a mere 300 to 400 words a year we can foster an annual growth of around 3000 to 4000 words. From recpetion to leaving school we can therefore help children develop an essential word-hoard of something like 50,000 words."
You'll have to go and read the book to get a full sense of what is being said here (and I really recommend you do, there is not a single boring page in it).
However, the point I'd like to make is that we need to be ambitious in the number of words we explicitly* teach, whilst being realistic about it.
*this is not the blog post to go into this, but this word 'explicit' is crucial
What Kind of Words Should We Teach?
If you're not familiar with the work of Beck, McKeown and Kucan, get familiar. In their book 'Bringing Words To Life' they propose that words can be categorised into a 3-tier system:
Tier 1
Basic vocabulary used in every day speech and making up around 80% of every day speech
e.g. happy, talk, cold
Clearly important - especially for EAL and very early learners
Easy, decodable and already familiar
Connected with prior knowledge
Tier 2
High frequency words which occur often in speech and texts
e.g. avoid, fortunate, industrious
Play a large role in verbal functioning across a variety of domains
Necessary to understanding – often found in written texts but not spoken (see above)
Often have different meanings across different disciplines/subjects (e.g. Volume means 'the amount of space an object or substance occupies' in science, 'the calculated three-dimensional measure of a solid' in maths, 'the loudness of sound' in music and 'a book; a book in a series' in English)
Tier 3
Low frequency and specialised words
May be specific to domains (e.g. photosynthesis)
Instruct when need arises
From the above we should see that we don't need to explicitly teach tier 1 words, but we do need to explicitly teach tier 2 and 3 words. Although the temptation is to fill vocabulary lists with tier 3 words, our lists should actually be weighted towards tier 2 words, ensuring that we are teaching the subject-specific meanings.
In short: select tier 2 and 3 words, with a heavier focus on tier 2 words
Key Vocabulary and Key Concepts
When selecting vocabulary for your subject's curriculum, you might want to think about whether or not the words you are choosing represent key concepts for the subject, or across subjects. If you find yourself identifying the same key words across units and across year groups, it may be the case that you have identified a key concept.
What might start off as a piece of key vocabulary can become a key concept. To begin to understand a concept, you need to have some conception of what the word itself means, but as time goes by, meaning will be added to that word as understanding of the concept grows. This means that a word you teach as a piece of key vocabulary in year 1, can become a key concept in all following year groups and units of work. You may teach a child what 'empire' means in year 3, and then remind them of it in every relevant KS2 unit thereafter as you cover further elements and examples of empire.
I've written lots about concept-led curricula and how important they are so I won't repeat myself here. Instead you can read the following blog posts if this is something you think you need to develop:
No Repeated Words - All New Words
So, rather than repeating words, you can treat some of them as key concepts. Others of them you can treat as item of prior knowledge: essential to be reminded of, important to revisit, but ultimately something that they already know. This leaves space and time for new vocabulary to be introduced, for children's vocabulary to be expanded at the rate that is required and for children to grasp the vocabulary they need to be able to learn the content of the new unit.
In short: choose new words for each unit, but also identify which words will be revisited due to their relevance.
A Realistic Number Of Words & The Most Important Words
Although the main aim of teaching vocabulary is to help children understand the content of the curriculum, we have to be realistic too. Choosing too many words can represent an impossible goal. A manageable number must be selected.
Of this manageable number, there must be a prioritisation process. It can't be the easiest words to learn, or the most unusual, or interesting, or the ones that fit certain spellings patterns - it must be the words that are absolutely the most essential to understanding the content of the curriculum.
And, if you find yourself wanting to select too great a number of essential worlds, this might be an indicator that you have too much content. If you don't have time to teach all the vocabulary relevant to the selected content then you certainly won't also have time to teach that content properly. Having too many key words can point you towards slimming down your intended curriculum content.
In short: I'll put a number on it - around 10 new words per unit should be manageable and should represent a realistic amount of content to be taught. These words should be the ones that are most crucial to understanding of the content.
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