Vocabulary & Word Knowledge

Vocabulary measures are noisy. A single standardised score tells you about English word knowledge on one day, not about capacity, and it is heavily shaped by exposure. Build a picture across sources before drawing conclusions.

• Compare vocabulary with other language skills: understanding, grammar, sequencing, word-finding.
• Compare across subjects — a pupil who acquires football, gaming and animal vocabulary readily is learning words efficiently.
• For pupils learning EAL, gather information about the home language. Difficulty in all a child's languages is a different signal from difficulty in English only.
• Check hearing history, including glue ear, and any period of significant absence.
• Ask whether words taught explicitly are retained after two or three weeks; that response to teaching is more informative than a baseline score.
• Note word-finding behaviour: circumlocution, long pauses, "I know it but I can't say it", frequent substitutions.

• Pre-teaching before the lesson is usually higher value than intervention after it, and protects inclusion.
• Where a TA delivers vocabulary work, make sure the words come from the class curriculum, not from a generic scheme.
• For pupils learning EAL, prioritise access and exposure — visuals, partner talk, subject word banks, first-language support where possible — before considering intervention.
• Distinguish provision for word-finding (retrieval cues, categories, semantic links, extra time) from provision for limited exposure (more encounters, more talk).
• Keep whole-class practice under review before adding anything additional. If vocabulary teaching is thin across the school, individual plans will not compensate.

Vocabulary alone is rarely the reason for a referral. What makes a referral useful is a fuller language picture: understanding, sentence structure, word-finding, narrative, and how the child responds to good teaching over time.

• Refer with evidence of what has been tried and for how long, not with a score alone.
• Be explicit about the child's languages — an English-only picture invites the wrong conclusion.
• Only a speech and language therapist can diagnose DLD; the RCSLT reports it affects around 7.6% of children.
• Know your local pathway's waiting times and what the school will put in place meanwhile.

• Lead with what the child does well with words, then the specific barrier.
• Never suggest a family should stop using their home language. It is not supported by evidence and it costs the child.
• Offer two or three realistic things — shared reading, talking about the day, reusing a word — rather than a home programme.
• Be honest that vocabulary builds slowly, so that a term with modest movement is not read as failure.

Standardised vocabulary scores move slowly and are insensitive to a term's work. Choose measures that will show change.

• Retention checks on taught words two and six weeks after teaching.
• Use of taught vocabulary in the pupil's own talk and writing, sampled termly.
• Reduction in the scaffolding needed to reach the same outcome.
• Comprehension on texts containing pre-taught vocabulary versus texts without.
• The pupil's own account of whether lessons make more sense.

1. Department for EducationProfessional guidance
   The reading framework: teaching the foundations of literacy (2021, updated 2023)

   Sets out the Simple View of Reading — comprehension depends on word reading and language comprehension together — and a substantial section on developing talk. It is about teaching practice, not about any particular vocabulary programme.

2. Department for EducationStatutory guidance
   SEND Code of Practice: 0 to 25 years (2015)

   Names communication and interaction as one of the four broad areas of SEN and sets out the graduated approach — assess, plan, do, review — that schools must follow.

3. Department for EducationStatutory guidance
   Early years foundation stage statutory framework (current version)

   Communication and language is one of three prime areas; providers must give children a language-rich environment and back-and-forth conversation.

4. Education Endowment FoundationResearch summary
   Oral language interventions (Teaching and Learning Toolkit)

   Rates oral language approaches — including explicit vocabulary teaching and structured discussion — as high impact for very low cost, based on extensive evidence. The Toolkit is revised periodically; check the live page for the current figure rather than quoting an older one.

5. Education Endowment FoundationResearch summary
   Preparing for Literacy: improving communication, language and literacy in the early years (2018)

   Recommends high-quality adult–child interaction and deliberate vocabulary development, and notes the recommendations may also apply to older pupils who have fallen behind.

6. Education Endowment FoundationResearch summary
   Improving Literacy in Key Stage 1 (2017, updated)

   Places language capability — vocabulary, listening and structured talk — among the foundations of early reading and writing.

7. Education Endowment FoundationResearch summary
   Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 (2017, updated 2021)

   Recommends teaching a small number of useful words in depth, teaching pupils how words work — including roots, prefixes and suffixes — and using structured discussion to build comprehension.

8. Education Endowment FoundationResearch summary
   Getting to the root of vocabulary instruction (blog) (2024)

   Discusses morphology — teaching how words are built — as a promising approach. Promising is the right word: the UK trial base here is still small.

9. Royal College of Speech and Language TherapistsProfessional guidance
   Clinical information: developmental language disorder (DLD)

   Reports that DLD affects around 7.6% of children — roughly two in a class of thirty. DLD affects understanding and using language and is diagnosed by a speech and language therapist, not inferred from a low vocabulary score.

10. NICEProfessional guidance
    Early years: promoting health and wellbeing in under 5s (QS128), quality statement 2: speech and language (2016)

    Notes that children with communication difficulties are at increased risk of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. It concerns early identification in the under-fives, not primary-age vocabulary teaching.

11. Clegg, Law, Rush, Peters & RoulstoneResearch evidence
    The contribution of early language development to children's emotional and behavioural functioning at 6 years (ALSPAC), Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (2015)

    UK birth-cohort study finding an association between early language and later emotional and behavioural functioning. Observational, so it shows a link, not that improving vocabulary improves behaviour.

12. Dixon, Thomson & FrickeResearch evidence
    Evaluation of an explicit vocabulary teaching intervention for children learning English as an additional language in primary school, Child Language Teaching and Therapy (2020)

    UK primary evaluation showing explicit vocabulary teaching benefits pupils learning English as an additional language.

13. Murphy & Unthiah (University of Oxford, for the EEF and the Bell Foundation)Research summary
    A systematic review of intervention research examining English language and literacy development in children with EAL (2015)

    Review of what helps pupils learning EAL. A lower score on an English-only vocabulary test is a measure of English exposure, not of ability or of a language disorder.

14. CushingResearch evidence
    Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the 'word gap' in England's education policy, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (2022)

    A UK critique of how the 'word gap' has been used in English education policy. Worth reading alongside the vocabulary literature, not instead of it.

15. Sperry, Sperry & MillerResearch evidence
    Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds, Child Development (2019)

    Found that the widely quoted '30 million word gap' figure (Hart & Risley, 1995, USA) does not replicate. The figure is still repeated in training materials; it should not be treated as established fact.

16. Speech and Language UKProfessional guidance
    Ages and Stages

    Qualitative descriptions of typical communication development by age band. Ranges, not norms — individual variation is expected.

17. NHSProfessional guidance
    Help your child learn to talk

    Plain-language NHS advice for families on everyday talk. Practical guidance rather than a research source.