Research School Network: Getting to know words Mark Miller, Head of Bradford Research School, on degrees of knowing words

When we talk about ​‘knowing’ a word, we are not talking about one thing. Because over time our knowledge of a word changes. Cronbach (1942) set out the ways that our knowledge of words develops:

Generalization: You can define a word.
Application: You can use it correctly in a particular context.
Breadth: You know the multiple meanings of the word.
Precision: You are able to apply the word appropriately in all situations
Availability: You can use the word where apt.

But how do we develop this complex understanding of these words? How do we really get to know them? How do we shift along this continuum, moving from a passing nod to a lifelong friendship?

Lovely to meet you

Words can be explicitly taught. But we can’t teach everything, so we have to choose the right ones to teach. Many of us will be familiar with the concept of Tier 2 words, as defined by Beck, McKeown and Kucan in their 2013 book Bringing Words to Life. Tier 1 words are the most basic words (hat; smile; dog), Tier 3 and complex, low-frequency and often context-specific (isthmus; haemoglobin; epaulette), and Tier 2 are ​“high frequency words for mature language users.” You can read an excerpt from the book, exploring tiers of vocabulary here. Tier 2 words are where we should spend more of our time explicitly teaching.

But the majority of words encountered by pupils will not be explicitly taught, so we have to provide them with strategies to work out the meaning. Dictionaries can help, but definitions can often be short and lack precision. Look at this definition of pliable: easily bent; flexible. It’s correct, but not precise. The Collins COBUILD dictionary is a great way to get things more precise and can be used for vocabulary lists.

If something is pliable, you can bend it easily without cracking or breaking it.
As your baby grows bigger, his bones become less pliable.
The finely twined baskets are made with young, pliable spruce roots.
Someone who is pliable can be easily influenced and controlled by other people.

These definitions can used to create better vocabulary lists. But, as Stahl and Nagy write in Teaching Word Meanings, ​“the ​‘meaning’ of a word is not its definition. Instead, a word’s meaning changes in every context in which it appears.” So our relationship with words goes beyond the first encounter.

Tell me about yourself

Finding out more about words helps to build this richer knowledge of them. We can use morphology, breaking a word into its constituent parts, as a way of working out meaning or exploring words we already know. It can be modelled by the teacher, as in this example from the EEF’s Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools guidance report.

Opportunities occur all the time to explore this in the classroom, even by chance. I was asked in a lesson (March 2020!) about the word ​‘pandemic’ and looked it up on etymonline.com. It’s from the Greek pan=all and dēmos=people. And it didn’t take long for us to make the links to ​‘epidemic’ and ​‘democracy’.

And to continue on the theme, you can explore origins of other words like quarantine:

quarantine (n.)1660s, ​“period a ship suspected of carrying disease is kept in isolation,” from Italian quaranta giorni, literally ​“space of forty days,” from quaranta ​“forty,” from Latin quadraginta ​“forty,” which is related to quattuor ​“four” (from PIE root *kwetwer- ​“four”). So called from the Venetian policy (first enforced in 1377) of keeping ships from plague-stricken countries waiting off its port for 40 days to assure that no latent cases were aboard. Also see lazaretto. The extended sense of ​“any period of forced isolation” is from 1670s.

Alex Quigley has a powerpoint exploring etymology here, along with a wealth of vocabulary resources. We can’t explore the origins of every single word, but in getting to know some we are modelling these approaches, we’re building a curiosity for language, and we’re shifting pupils’ knowledge along the continuum I first set out.

Nice to see you again

If we want that sense of breadth, precision and availability, we must encounter words in multiple contexts. Teachers can engineer these opportunities e.g. by preteaching vocabulary, which are then encountered in a text or classroom materials. Not only will this help with the understanding of the text, but the extra encounter breeds a little more familiarity with the text.

But it’s also familiar-seeming words that we meet again in new contexts. In the Improving Secondary Science guidance report, they state that ​“pupils need to be explicitly taught new scientific vocabulary and this can be challenging; however, it is familiar words used in unfamiliar contexts that cause most difficulty;”

Another example comes from the Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools guidance regarding Maths:

In this great blog from Teach Like a Champion, they highlight the need to practice using words: ​“We learn words by using them and seeing them over and over in different settings that are rich and challenging. So a key part of vocabulary instruction is to put students in situations where they apply their nascent knowledge of a word.”

The nuance can be explored by moving beyond the vocabulary list and exploring words through questions. Either with these words on their own: why would you want to emulate someone’s success? Or by combining words to probe the understand: why would you need reconciliation after a dispute?

A good place to end the blog is with these guidelines for vocabulary instruction from Michael F Graves in The Vocabulary Book:

• Include both definitional and contextual information
• Involve students in active and deep processing of the world
• Provide students with multiple exposures to the word
• Review, rehearse and remind students about the word in various contexts over time
• Involve students in discussion of the word’s meaning
• Spend a significant time on the word
  
  

And then we won’t just know words – they will be our BFFs.

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