Research School Network: Selecting the most ​‘sciencey’ words With so many words to teach how can we carefully select the most meaningful for detailed instruction?

I am a self-confessed science geek: science is great; I love it. I have read a lot of science, science fiction, science fact, science magazines, academic papers, text books, blogs, exam papers and specifications. All the words more-or-less make sense to me and I love them; I see why they need to be complicated and I even indulge in a spot of sesquipedalianism
for fun. ​“Don’t drop the polymethylmethacrylate, it might crack”.

Part of my geekery involved churning all of the Science GCSE specification content through a text analyser to prove a science GCSE has more new words to learn than a modern foreign language or for that matter any subject. Science, I felt, placed the heaviest vocabulary load on students. The numbers would tell me, I would be right.

Of course, I didn’t consider the fact that some subjects use their words in so many different ways or that some of them were not even in the English dictionary. However, with margins of error included I can confirm now, scientifically, that science ​“has a lot of new words to learn”. As a teacher of science I was going to have to support my students to develop their language and vocabulary skills otherwise they would literally have no idea what I was talking about. This was out of my comfort zone.

With the touch of a button on my spreadsheet I re-ordered all the science words in frequency order culling the bottom 1000 or so as well as frequent words like ​“and”,”the” and ​“specification”. I wanted the top ten and they had to be ​‘sciencey’. The words students would stumble over, but once unlocked would open a door to understanding the universe.

Once formulated the list was a little predictable and I did feel a little bit like I should have sent an email to the department with a, ​“Please write your top 5 difficult words from Biology” and I would have had the same list. But it is good to have a firm evidence base these days.

Our next steps involved a long process of generating a Powerpoint with 5 non-negotiable words for each of the 24 AQA science units in combined science. Each word having its structure broken into prefix, root/​base and suffix. With the morphology secure, each unit students would see at a glance that words such as geothermal comprises of geo (earth), therm (heat) and al (result of). Off we raced to come up with a long list of words with the same prefix: geography, geology… all relating to the Earth in some way. Then ​“where would we use or see the root ​“therm” in a sentence?” This yielded thermos, thermometer, thermostat. I was very pleased, this was working and only took 5 minutes at the start of a lesson or as a research homework.

The next step will be to extend to the whole of Key Stage 4 so we can ready students far in advance of their exams. The challenge we face was brought home in the Physics 2 paper 2019, the very last paper most will have sat:

​‘What is… terametre?’

Student thinks… ​“I know about tera bytes (Tb) of storage, it’s 1000x more than a giga or 1,000,000x more than a mega… good job I know my prefixes.”

The job continues, now for polymethylmethacrylate…

Hamish Harron, Subject Leader for Science, Scalby School

To learn more about the ​‘Language for Learning’ project or ways in which Huntington can support literacy at your school then email mh.​jones@​huntington-​ed.​org.​uk