Students at secondary school may struggle to transfer vocabulary between subjects, or need support in navigating the complex academic codes that they may not encounter in everyday conversation, given the increasingly specialised languages of different subject disciplines.
This ‘Clip from the Classroom’ from Shotton Hall Research School highlights a key aspect of practice in this area by exemplifying approaches from recommendation two of the Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools guidance report: provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject.
In this video, Joanna Lamb, Head of School at Bedlington Academy (North East Learning Trust) carefully unpicks the word ‘biosphere’ in a Geography lesson, drawing on pupils’ prior knowledge by breaking down the word into its composite parts to build their receptive and expressive language.
She leads pupils through this process:
1. Practise pronunciation
2. Give a definition
3. Explain, using morphology
4. Build word families
5. Model an example sentence
6. Use the vocabulary in their own sentence
7. Revisit and reward
Students develop their understanding and their ability to connect this learning to new vocabulary they might encounter in the future (in Geography and beyond), thereby increasing their word consciousness.
Next steps:
Read this blog to consider vocabulary instruction across the curriculum from a primary perspective.
Visit our disciplinary literacy tree resource to further explore how different subjects communicate.