“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.
