The science proves it: boosting your child’s vocabulary is like providing a multivitamin for your child’s education. Yes, they can scrape through school with a basic vocabulary but with an excellent vocabulary, they’ll be flying through the 11+, acing English and verbal reasoning papers, understanding comprehension texts beyond their years and adding dazzling descriptions to their creative writing.
Not just that but a broad vocabulary will also boost your child’s performance in other subjects, like maths and science.
There’s been a ton of research on how best to teach vocabulary but, whilst many people have opinions on teaching vocabulary, very few people actually follow the science.
Luckily, we’ve trawled through the research for you to figure out what works and what doesn’t, so if your child struggles to remember new vocabulary, stick around to find out why and what you can do instead.
Whilst many people have opinions on the best way to learn vocabulary, this advice is often contradicted by the research, so it’s easy to end up using the wrong methods to teach your child vocabulary.
Science tells us that best way to improve vocabulary is through direct instruction, not rote learning or even reading, so throw away those word lists and start using methods that work.
If you can combine direct vocabulary instruction while also relating the word to a picture, that’s even better.
Learning common morphemes (i.e. base words, prefixes and suffixes) is another way of teaching a word directly. The beauty of this approach is that it will give your child the tools to decode totally new words as well.
Teach your child how to decipher the meanings of new words with our free morpheme download.
So far, you may have been relying on books to boost your child’s vocabulary. The problem is that books won’t necessarily repeat words several times, which makes it hard for your child to one: grasp the meaning of a word, and two: remember it.
Use spaced repetition when learning a word, whether that’s from a book, flashcard or a word list. Cover words for two days in a row, then again a couple of days later, and again a week or two after that. Use different ways of revising – flashcards, apps, games and discussion – to keep things interesting.
Think of vocabulary like velcro – it needs something to stick to to stay in your child’s brain. If you’re learning words in isolation, words won’t be sticky enough and will quickly be forgotten.
Create example sentences together; discuss how you should – and shouldn’t – use words and try to spot them in the world around you; this can be in reading, on T.V. or in conversation.
You can also give context by linking a word to a story; this can be an example from real life or it can even be the story of the word’s origins. These stories help to make words extra sticky.
To incorporate these tips into your practice, I’d recommend using our illustrated flashcards. The pictures make it easy to discuss words, plus the etymology tips and collocations (word pairings) give your child the memory hooks they need.
Handily, our flashcards also come with free app access, so you can shake up study time with multiple ways to learn.
Visit Build Your Vocab Plan to figure out which of our vocab tools will be best for your child.
