One of the worst things about being unwell is setting cover. Everyone has those ghastly days of knowing they are too ill to function in the unforgiving environment of a school. This increases at the thought of trying to set meaningful cover work for 5 or 6 classes. There are very few jobs in which […]
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We recently held a small event in our Oxford offices to talk to primary and secondary school teachers about vocabulary and the Word Gap in their school. Lots of interesting, practical ideas were shared and discussed and we have summarised some of them here: Give key vocabulary at the start of each lesson. Encourage students […]
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Summer exams are almost here. It is a time for cautious optimism, but also a little teacher anxiety, as we will our pupils on to succeed. Worried questions race through our minds: what if they don’t understand the question? What if a word in the question trips them up? What if they give up? Each […]
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In 2018 we surveyed over 1,300 primary and secondary teachers about their experiences of the Word Gap in schools and collated our findings in the Oxford Language Report. Following on from this research, we partnered with Teachit to develop downloadable packs of resources and initiatives that can be used in the classroom. The Read more
Over a year ago, in a previous post for this blog , I wrote about my focus of encouraging students of ALL ages to ‘Speak Like A Geographer’. This was in light of having previously restricted this focus on terminology to GCSE and A Level cohorts – and wondering why they didn’t manage to adjust to the required key words and […]
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I was not surprised when I finished reading ‘Why Closing the Word Gap Matters: Oxford Language Report’ , but it still made for sombre reading. The report put in black and white what teachers already know: Most of the students we teach don’t have the vocabulary they need to fulfil their full potential at school. The word gap affects students’ wider life chances. After […]
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By Jean Gross CBE, formerly the government’s Communication Champion for children and young people. Oxford University Press recently published the Oxford Language Report – a study into the effects of the word gap on children’s learning and what we can do to combat this. Here, Jean Gross CBE, offers some practical suggestions about how we […]
Read more By Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Let’s start with what we know: language matters. There. That’s it. Vocabulary is a huge predictor of how far children from any background will succeed at school and beyond. The words they know will help them to read, understand, gain new […]
Read more The first Oxford Language Report finds evidence of a significant word gap in UK schools, a problem which is holding back children’s learning and which teachers believe is getting worse. Here Jane Harley, Strategy Director ED-UK at Oxford University Press, gives some background to the report and explains why closing the word gap matters. Why […]
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Written by lexicographer Roz Combley There’s nothing like the real thing I was recently lucky enough to analyse the Oxford Corpus, a 55-million-word collection of children’s writing from the BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words story competition. Any lexicographer will tell you that once you’ve worked with a corpus—a wonderfully powerful resource of real language evidence—you […]
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