What is pre-teaching vocabulary?

What is pre-teaching vocabulary?

Pre-teaching vocabulary is a language intervention to develop your child’s ability to understand and use vocabulary in their environment and to engage with curriculum work.

What are vocabulary difficulties?

Children with vocabulary difficulties find it hard to learn and remember vocabulary, and or may have difficulty retrieving the words they need during conversations. You might notice difficulty understanding what they read, or you might see that they have difficulty explaining their ideas, or using ‘filler’ words such as “thingy”, “that” or hesitations in their talking.

What are the core skills for learning vocabulary?

Pre-teaching vocabulary allows children with vocabulary difficulties to overlearn vocabulary they hear in their everyday experiences, for example everyday words, words relating to behaviour policies and rules, and within the topic or curriculum. This increases your child’s ability to understand and retrieve words, and therefore engage in interactions and learning.

Core skills for learning and remembering a word include:

• Identifying and learning which category the word belongs to, for example, that apples and banana are both fruit, or that car and aeroplane are both types of transport
• Identifying and learning the sound sequence, also known as the phonology of the word, for example, a-pple, ba-na-na, ae-ro-plane
• Learning what type of word it is, and therefore how to use it in a sentence, for example, the girl is eating a red apple – ‘person’ or ‘subject’ is the ‘girl’, action word or ‘verb’ is ‘eating’, describing words or ‘concept’ is ‘red’, and object or ‘noun’ is the ‘apple’
• Learning the word meaning, for example, that a ladybird is a red and black spotty insect with 6 legs that can fly, or that photosynthesis is how plants turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar

Alongside pre-teaching the vocabulary in small groups, you can use vocabulary mats in class to help your child recall vocabulary during learning tasks.

How to pre-teach and over-learn topic vocabulary using word webs

• Select the most important vocabulary items from the curriculum, identified on a weekly or half-termly basis
• Create a word web for each word. What it means, what it sounds like, how many syllables, related words, put the word in a sentence and so on
• Learn the words before they are used in the classroom
• Repetition is crucial. Repeat the word in a variety of contexts in and out of the classroom
• Pre-teaching vocabulary can be done individually or in a group

Suggested activities for learning and storing new words

• Introduce the new word. “Have you heard (target word) before?” “What do you know about (target word?)”
• Discuss and identify sound links for the new word. “What does it start with?” “What does it rhyme with?” “How many syllables does it have?” “What does it end with?”
• Discuss and identify meaning links for the new word, for example “What category does it belong to?” “What do you do with it?” “What is it used for?”
• Practise saying the word. Break the word down into syllables and let your child practise saying it.
• Use the word in a sentence. This is so your child knows where the word comes in a sentence. Start off the sentence and see if your child can fill in the blanks.
• Choose a game. Your child can choose a board game or any game that involves turn-taking. For each turn, take it in turns to provide some information about the new word, such as something about the meaning or sounds of the word.