A good vocabulary is an important building block for helping language learners to communicate effectively, but it’s also essential to school performance more widely.for more info https://voiceskills.org/

1. Why does Vocabulary Matter

2.  A good vocabulary is an important building block for helping
language learners to communicate effectively, but it’s also
essential to school performance more widely. Research
consistently finds that the extent of a child’s vocabulary
knowledge relates strongly to their overall academic success - a
child’s vocabulary when they are five years old can tell us how
well they may do at school at 11.
 Vocabulary and spoken language in general, is a key foundation
for literacy. If children who have just started learning to read
know the words they are reading, they can more easily and
quickly sound out, read, and understand them, as well as
comprehend what they’re reading: a solid vocabulary is the
bridge between phonics and reading comprehension.

3.  Teaching lists of words out of context can be a
starting point for observation, and for conversations
about language acquisition. But the emphasis for me
should be on the use of vocabulary within the context
of the entire language system. It can’t sit in isolation.
Vocabulary in Context

4.  Conversely, many of the children in the schools where
I work come to school without what you might call
“book” or “academic” language, or conversational
language. But within their homes and communities, in
their context, of course they have language! What
these children might lack is the language, or the so-
called ‘cultural capital,’ to access what teachers
expect in school. That simply means you have to
teach it.
Perceptions of Vocabulary Learning
are also Contextually Driven

5.  When it is about teaching vocabulary, it is related to the
acquisition of language. So we might begin exploring ideas
of phoneme correspondence, and expecting children to
recognize a word – a task which is very difficult for them if
they don’t have the word in their active vocabulary. If it’s
not in their active vocabulary they have less idea of how it
might sound or where the emphasis or stress may come in
the word: it remains in effect a nonsense word, unless they
have the skills to work out what it means in the context of
the surrounding text.
Active Vocabulary

6.  In the classroom, vocabulary is low-hanging fruit: easy to
grasp and observe, it provides a ready insight into some of
the challenges that children can face as they learn. Yet
while teachers have a sense of what vocabulary is, whether
that is accurate or not is a really interesting question.
 As a matter of fact, standalone assessments that help a
teacher look more closely at each different aspect of
literacy learning, might help in enabling students acquire a
wider range of vocabulary.
Measuring Vocabulary

7.  For example, we get children to spend 10 minutes with a paper
and pencil and write down as many words as they know how to
spell. Statistical data says that the number of correctly spelt
words ranged from 3 to 118 over a group of around 200 children.
 To understand what this tells us, we need to think about what
the task requires. The children have to recall words they know
how to spell: it isn’t the case that the child who only writes 8
words doesn’t know more just that they can’t write them down.
 From the words that they do write, you can begin to establish
whether they have semantic networks, i.e. do they write blue,
yellow, red, or do they appear to choose words more randomly?
This, in turn, will have a bearing on their writing ability.

8.  We need to be aware of what assessments can show us,
and what they can’t. It is often assumed, for instance, that
the phonics screening check measures reading. But it
doesn’t measure reading; it measures one aspect of
reading.
 There are a lot of reading assessments that are used all the
way through school, to form the basis of judgments about
children’s attainment. But we need to think critically: what
do these assessments test? What does each really
measure? Is the assessment a proxy, and if so, is it an
appropriate proxy for what we actually want?
Understanding Assessment

9.  Voice Training and Research Institute
 No.135, First Main Road,
K.K Nagar, Madurai- 625020.
 E-mail: support@voiceskills.org
 Ph no: +91- 95970 82692 / 95970 84540
Web: https://voiceskills.org/
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