Research School Network: Cultivating pupils’ scientific vocabulary: developing the Polysemous tier In this blog, evidence lead Matthew Peach explore how one school has put evidence around teaching of vocabulary into action.

“But, Sir: that’s not what that means!“

A sea of eyes stare at you as you begin to explain that ​‘attract’ has a dual meaning.

“Sometimes words have more than one meaning, Jonny…!”

At our school, the teaching of new vocabulary has been in place for a while, with the ELKAN approach being embedded into classrooms across the primary age range.

However, the new EEF ​‘Improving Primary Science’ guidance report introduces another tier alongside the familiar Tier 1, 2, and 3: the ​‘polysemous’ tier. This tier highlights the specific need to explicitly teach words that have dual meanings – an everyday meaning and a science-specific meaning.

Our school have already adopted the tiered system, developed by Beck, McKeown and Kucan, in our science units of work across the primary curriculum. Teachers are encouraged in their medium-term plans to identify the specific vocabulary to be taught and learnt in that unit of work. In light of the new EEF guidance, we are adapting this further by incorporating polysemous vocabulary into our schemes to ensure we are not assuming the children are aware of a dual meaning of a particular word such as ​‘attract’.

This can be seen in the extract below:

As science subject lead, I have started to adapt the vocabulary identified in our scheme to fit the EEF guidance as an aid for teachers when planning their lessons.

The benefits of this are two-fold.

Firstly, teachers have an example of what the vocabulary for a unit of science teaching which might benefit from explicit teaching. As this is rooted in evidence from a credible source, teachers can see the benefit of implementing this aspect of science teaching across the school. Supported by discussion and professional development, teachers can take the examples given on the schemes to then support their own science teaching in their specific year group, using their own expertise within their phase to put this evidence into practice. 

Secondly and most importantly, though, the children are benefitting as they are being explicitly taught new vocabulary and its meaning. They are given repeated opportunities to engage in the new vocabulary over the course of the unit being taught and supported in developing new, more specific scientific meanings to already familiar everyday words.

One teacher at our school has even developed an aspect of their display to showcase how prominent vocabulary is in their classroom. They regularly reward students who are able to identify words that we use in everyday speech but have a specific meaning in a scientific context too.