: Explicit Vocabulary Teaching: Planting the Seed Don Valley Academy’s approach to boosting confidence and fluency in literacy.

At Don Valley Academy (DVA), we are always striving for new methods to develop confidence and fluency in all students, especially our lower attaining readers. Despite having a supportive Trust-wide Reading Strategy and a reading intervention pathway, students often struggle to identify and retain Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary after the initial reading of a text. It can feel like planting seeds in inhospitable soil; despite our best efforts, only a few ​‘plants’ take root and flourish.

Our new Y7 cohort arrived as the weakest readers in the whole Trust, with their Standardised Age Score (SAS) initially just below the desired average of 100. They will need extra support throughout their time at DVA. As a Research School, and across Delta Trust, we recognise the need for an explicit vocabulary strategy (see our first recorded experiment here: Explicit vocabulary instruction in… | Research Schools Network); this is vital to boost the confidence and ability of encountering and retaining complex language for students from all backgrounds.

I share a Y8 class with a brilliant Early Career Teacher (ECT) in our English department, Maddie Radley. In Y7, many of these students received phonics intervention. While many have progressed significantly, most still have reading ages below their actual ages, alongside EAL and SEND needs. We wanted to experiment with explicitly teaching new, relevant vocabulary to help students retain and use these words long-term.

On the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) ​‘Vocabulary and Language’ episode from the ​‘Evidence into Action’ podcast series, co-host Alex Reynolds outlines that explicit vocabulary teaching for the benefit of long-term retention should include the following three elements (which I re-interpreted into the following diagram for my own use):

Maddie describes her approach using this structure with 8D1:

​“In preparation for a reading focus as part of the ​‘I Am Malala’ scheme of work, I explicitly taught students the word ​‘responsibility’. I provided them with the knowledge of what it sounds like, what it looks like, and what it means to ensure a fuller understanding.

I gave students the etymology of the word, which led one student to question, ​‘So, have we stolen most of our prefixes from France?’ referring to the ​‘re’ part, which suggests an idea of returning or responding. He linked this to other words like ​‘respect’, ​‘rescue’, and ​‘result’, understanding they imply a reciprocal relationship.

This indicated he recognised this from previous explicit vocabulary teaching, creating links across different contexts. I defined ​‘responsibility’ as ​‘to have care and accountability for a person or thing.’ Realising ​‘accountability’ might confuse students, I focused on ​‘care.’ One student commented, ​‘my mum calls me responsible’ because she babysits, showing she ​‘cares’ for the children, making her responsible.

Before applying ​‘responsibility’ to ​‘I Am Malala,’ students completed a low-stakes whiteboard activity, applying ​‘responsibility’ to two teachers they know. All students successfully completed this.”

This model of explicitly teaching vocabulary can be used for any group, regardless of ability. Maddie’s methods are also supported by the EEF’s Recommendation 2 from ​‘Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools’, specifically with regards to how it is vital that all teachers must ​‘provide targeted vocabulary instruction’ through ​‘effective approaches’ to ​‘make connections between words’; at DVA, we have found it effective for helping students recognise and connect root words, suffixes, and prefixes, and develop confidence in using complex or new words accurately in context, e.g., ​‘Malala’s life has become very treacherous because the Taliban threaten Mingora.’

To conclude, focusing on the following aspects when explicitly teaching vocabulary helps develop confidence in students by reducing cognitive load, the first step in acquiring and using new vocabulary accurately and allowing vocabulary knowledge to be ​‘planted’ and ​‘take root’ far more effectively:

- Explain what the word means in student-friendly terms.
- Support students to visualise what the word looks like (images, practical lessons, diagrams).
- Model what the word sounds like, slowly and repeatedly.
- Be aware of cognitive overload – more than one or two words taught explicitly at one time will likely not be retained.
- Revisit the word repeatedly through constant references to the chosen word to support retention (e.g. through quizzing, word walls, in different contexts, etc).

See Don Valley Academy’s approach to teaching vocabulary across the curriculum in our Clips from the Classroom video, Explicit vocabulary instruction in secondary school.