Vocabulary, the National Curriculum of England, and where we go from here (+ a resource).

I have an ambivalent attitude towards the English national curriculum. I find much to dwell upon in its 201 pages or so but also plenty that disturbs me -and nothing more so, perhaps, than the NCs treatment of vocabulary. I have no quarrel with the NC designers. My gripe lies with school management overseas who follow the NC to the letter despite students for whom the curriculum was never designed and for which it remains unsuited. The NC designers scarcely address vocabulary teaching, and understandably so, since children in England receive pretty much 24/7 English language exposure from which vocabulary will develop informally. If you suspect an 'opt out,' then consider your own vocabulary learning experiences. Personally, I rarely studied vocabulary during English lessons and this likely applies to you if you attended a school in England. And yet here we are, the masters of some 20,000 word families. For English L1 children, in England (those for whom the NC caters), I feel the NC got it right: "teach obscure topic words as the need arises, but do not miss out on useful words children have failed to gain despite their everyday English exposure." My UK colleagues seem happy with this, and that as good an endorsement as any. But yes, if you're wondering, I agree that EAL students can miss out somewhat (and so a 'thumbs up' to NALDIC that plugs the gaps where the NC falls short). And, yes, the NC could surely have said a little more on vocabulary given EAL learners' particular needs and the growing EAL contingent in English schools today. That said, let's give credit where it's due. The DfE regularly publishes advice on understanding and responding to EAL students' requirements. If you haven't read it, I urge you to take a look at the DfE's Developing quality tuition: effective practice in schools - English as an additional language. There's a lot of good common sense in those pages.

But let's move on and consider what happens when you 'apply' the NC wholesale to private education overseas. Inevitably we now run into difficulties. The NC never claimed to cater to the needs of students in Hanoi, Bangkok or Shanghai. Predictably, when international and/or bilingual teachers insist on following the NC to the letter, learning cannot but seem less than stellar. Few in educational management outside of the UK care to admit it, but one cannot get around the truism that children with limited (or no) English exposure outside of their classroom will 'know' fewer English words, and to lesser depth, than their comparatively aged UK peers. That 'St. XYZ International School' proudly boasts an Olympic sized pool, glitzy auditorium, and classrooms equipped with the latest high-tech gizmos but that doesn't alter the reality. If an EAL child only experiences English within the school confines s/he will inevitably acquire a less impressive vocabulary than a peer who counts English as the 'home tongue.' No responsible EAL teacher working overseas can ignore this obvious, unoriginal, and easily-verifiable fact. Nor, do such teachers buy into the fiction that all will end well if we stick diligently to the NC and plough through those objectives. If we take our teaching seriously we need a principled and informed response to vocabulary deficits. If that means going beyond the NC's vocabulary provisions and taking a hard, look at students' vocabulary needs, then so be it. The question we need to ask is what should we do, exactly? Where do we go from here? It's one thing to identify a problem; it's quite another to figure out a sensible plan of action.

So, let's get back to basics. Most of us concerned with vocabulary shortfalls likely agree that first off we need a ready-made list of key words that students should master given their academic and social circumstances. Should we find, or successfully construct, this we still have nothing more than a collection of words, of course, but at least we've arrived, figuratively speaking, 'on the starting blocks' and can move on to think about how to begin building into our lessons a rational vocabulary element. Now, if we're still of 'like minds' at this point, then I assume you agree that 'fixing' vocabulary forces us to ask two critical preliminary questions: (1.) What are those elusive key words EAL learners need to know, and (2.) what principles should we draw upon to inform how we select those particular words from among the 100,000 or so word families that make up the English lexicon. Fortunately linguists and dictionary makers have tasked themselves just such questions for decades and have come up with a number of useful core vocabulary listings. That's the good news. Unfortunately, international schools (and if you know of exceptions, let me know) remain stubbornly unappreciative of just how valuable such lists can prove while also failing to recognize the importance of vocabulary development for EAL learners in general. Am I too harsh? Perhaps. But ask yourself: How many international schools do you know of that track vocabulary development or teach vocabulary explicitly? I cannot think of any. And yet it's not as if we don't have word lists out there that could provide a base around which to build an impressive vocabulary program. Examples of such lists include Longman Communication 3000, The Oxford 3000 (and 5000) and, for those of dealing with younger learners, the Dolch list. And yes, in case you're wondering, you can find these all freely available online.

Core vocabulary, selection principles.

The usual starting point for anyone aiming to compile a core vocabulary involves looking at data on word frequency of occurrence, the assumption being that more commonly occurring words (especially the 3000 most common) should prove more useful than the relatively rarer. Although this can prove a good starting point, lexicographers and linguists have long agreed that frequency alone will never provide all the words that EAL learners will likely find useful. Michael West (1953), author of the The General Service List, for example, took care to include relatively rare words if those words happened to have few or no synonyms from among the more common words he had already singled out for list inclusion. The Oxford 3000, another well-known word list built with EAL students foremost placed the same emphasis on frequency as did West but went further adding words that a panel of "language experts and experienced teachers" deemed particularly useful to EAL learners. The compilers cite as examples the names of body parts.

What about a core vocabulary for international and bilingual schools?

Despite a longstanding academic interest in vocabulary teaching, I only began looking into the practical side of teaching word meanings after noting the vocabulary deficits of my Vietnamese students, here in Hanoi. I had to do something, faced as I was with children who struggled to understand key words in grade 4 and 5 level texts whose authors had made no concessions to non-native English speakers. The question was 'what to do, exactly?' A google search for 'key words for EAL learners' soon brought up West's aforementioned General Service List List which, although dated, still accounts for around 84 percent of words you'll find in non-specialist texts. Perhaps I could teach this? A little more digging, however, and I came across a more recent version of the list (The New General Service List 2013) based on a much larger corpus (273 million words no less) and which provides notably better coverage -around 90 percent of words in non-specialist scripts. I had made a start. But that wasn't the end of the story. Trawling through the web some more, and I found we can in fact do even better still. If we add on words within the Academic Word list (key words found in science and technology texts originally identified by Avril Coxhead), the NGSL coverage rises to around 92 percent. I was on my way! Even so, combining the lists still didn't give me quite what I was looking for. Unfortunately, the NGSL caters primarily to the needs of older EAL learners. As the authors explain, the texts from which the list derives consist of reading materials aimed at those of 16 years of age and above. That's fine if you work in secondary. But what about a primary department? Luckily, help lay at hand. In the 1930s, William Dolch, notable as a whole-word proponent of reading instruction, set out to identify key words in children's texts of the period. He came up with 220 critical non-noun sight words together with a separate noun list of 95 words. He published his 315 word list (95+220) in 1936 and claimed that it contained around 50-70% of the vocabulary children encounter in school textbooks. Despite its datedness, you still find teachers making use of the list to this day. A recently updated version (see Brown and Culligan, 2020) has raised coverage to an even more substantial 90% of words in "most EFL materials for young learners." At last, thanks to Dolch, and the recent Dolch list revision, I could begin putting something usable together for my students.

The list.

To prove useful for the school as a whole, I needed a). a list of core vocabulary that included the 'must know' words for both primary and secondary students, and b). an indication of what words teachers should focus upon given students' grade level and vocabulary knowledge. My approach involved loading the NGSL into EXCEL and then cross-referencing each word with entries in the Oxford 3000 and Dolch Listings -this would identify in which of these additional lists each NGSL also appeared. The more lists in which the word had a presence, the more critical, it seemed to me, that students need master it. With this cross-referencing complete, I then rearranged the NGSL by frequency of word occurrence from most common to least. The result was a list in which each word has various associated encodings -or indexes- that hopefully assist teachers in matching words to student needs based upon age, grade level and prior knowledge. Since the final list runs from the most common to least common words, you could reasonably work through the list 'as is' -indeed, this is more or less how I am proceeding with my current grades 4 and 5 class. For very young children (Key stage 1), the words appearing with a red D designation seem especially worth focusing upon since the 'D' indicates a presence in the highly regarded new Dolch listing -more details on this all important encoding, below. As children move through Key stage 2 and on into secondary, teachers will likely aim to introduce words from the new academic word list. Ideally, a student would know this vocabulary by heart well before venturing into tertiary education. The final list, to be clear, stands as a resource from which teachers can compile bespoke lists by referencing the coding that appears alongside each word entry to ensure compatibility with student needs. The list appears under the resource tab (above). It includes the entire NGSL, a substantial number of words from both the Longman 3000 and the Oxford 3000, and all the words of the new Dolch list.

Text coverage

The cumulative proportion of words in the ‘average text’ that children will ‘understand’ (to a receptive standard) as they master each sub-list (Resources tab) in turn, appears in the table below. A child having learnt list 1, for example, should have familiarity with approximately 68% of words appearing in ‘general texts.’ Once they ‘know’ the words in both lists 1 and 2, that familiarity rises to around 75% and increases thereafter, albeit at an ever slower rate, up to around 92% of text coverage once children have learnt all lists up to list 11.

How to use

To use the list as a basis for creating your own bespoke, more relevant lists (and bespokeness is the essence of SR-EAL), you need to know the keys that accompany each word. Words highlighted in purple appear in the standard NGSL but also the subsection of the NGSL that contains the most common words in spoken language. I suggest that these purple words might sensibly be regarded as particularly useful to EAL students given that they appear prominently in both spoken and written English. As noted, the red letter D means the word appears in the New Dolch list, and therefore one that might appeal if working in the primary department. The letters A1, A2, B1 and B2, indicate the CEFR level that the word corresponds to and signify that the word as appears in the Oxford 3000 (i.e. A or B designation indicates a presence in the Oxford list). Typically you would probably choose to teach A1 words before teaching words in A2, and teach A2 words before teaching B1 etc. To illustrate the coding consider the word across (see below). The pink highlighting tells us that not only does the word appear in the NGSL but that it also rates as particularly common in spoken English. The red D reveals that the word appears in the New Dolch list, while the a2 shows that here we have a word that students would likely need to know at the A2 CEFR level.

And there you have it. As a SR-EALer, the notion of a bespoke vocabulary list lies dear to my heart. For just how critical is vocabulary to children's success in the school system here's a short piece by J. Miller.

https://www.jcfs.org/blog/importance-vocabulary#:~:text=A%20robust%20vocabulary%20improves%20all,ability%20to%20learn%20to%20read

As a concluding thought, I leave you with a question: Shouldn't International and Bilingual schools actively track children's vocabulary development as they progress through the school system? If you've stuck with me this far, my answer should come as no surprise: Yes, they should. And what better time than now!