Therefore, the activities in Closing the word gap: activities for the classroom have been designed to take into account the needs of students from a variety of backgrounds – disadvantaged or otherwise – and can be adapted to suit different levels of attainment. Here, she explains her rationale, the challenges of implementation and the impact that the programme has had on the young people of her inner-city secondary. The constraints of the past 18 months have limited further work across the curriculum although the principles of Language for Learning to develop and promote the use of academic language to maximise the attainment of all remains embedded in the whole school SIP. For example, the science department includes the question, “What other contexts do I see this word in? CTVG – Exploring Etymology PPT– this PPT offers a starter resources for exploring the etymology of individual words.

But, as Quigley emphasises, so too is vocabulary depth: what you know about words and how they connect to other words.Notably, perhaps this quote from Lemov et al (2018) fully encapsulates the salient aspects of explicit vocabulary teaching. The conclusions to each chapter, the appendices and the bulk of chapters 7 and 8 are worth the cost of the book alone. This love of language and continual curiosity about what words mean, where they are from, and their legion of connections, feels like the end-game of great vocabulary teaching. This can lead to cliché but nonetheless, students are finding it easier to make connections across the curriculum and bring wider thinking to their learning. Limited vocabulary prevents students from accessing their learning, developing self-esteem, and enjoying meaningful social interactions, severely affecting their future life chances.

All schools have the flexibility to teach vocabulary explicitly in a way that supports their pupils.

Explicitly teaching vocabulary can enrich knowledge and understanding of the world, and it’s a useful proxy for a great deal of general knowledge in a range of subject domains. In particular, the act of reading aloud can benefit pupils’ reading fluency, as well as proving a helpful bridge to increasing reading comprehension.

Even better, by attending to vocabulary and language, we can offer our pupils exactly the tools they need to flourish in the wider world.Results across all monitoring methods were positive and students recognised they were being taught vocabulary across all subjects. If this is twinned with high-quality reading instruction, then we are well on the way to helping children thrive with any curriculum.

Setting up a ‘classroom dictionary’ in domains like geography, science or maths, could help move the incidental learning to something more intentional. It has never been more important for us to close the “vocabulary gap”; this is one of the big narratives of Covid catch-up.

The vocabulary gap impacts on life’s opportunities, it is imperative that we do everything we can to reduce it. We have seen huge improvements in reading ages following our reading interventions, but have only recently split them into these three categories. Having a great curriculum is so key, but steering a path through it using explicit vocabulary instruction proves a great aid I think. Small but significant language choices like these occur repeatedly in classrooms – and in pupils’ minds – daily.