Teaching Key Vocabulary - A Process

In the subjects I teach, Sociology and Psychology, students have to almost learn a new language. 


There are abstract concepts, strange methodological terms and new words to describe old ideas. Making sure students can understand and use this vocabulary is crucial if they want to be effective social scientists. 


With this in mind, I now take vocabulary seriously, and am more than happy to give a large portion of the lesson over to ensuring students understand key terminology - in this blog I’m going to try and present a process for doing this.


1. Check Prior Knowledge


Sometimes, a word that you think that is new to the students may not be. They have learnt it in other subjects, or have some background knowledge of it. For example, as a psychology teacher I have to teach Adorno’s F Scale, which requires an understanding of the word fascism - students may have some understanding of this word from their history lessons. 


To check this prior knowledge, I usually simply ask a fairly open question for students to answer on their whiteboards:


What does the word fascism mean?


If I get a few blank faces and blank whiteboards, I know I’m going to have to spend some time explicitly teaching the word. If I get a class full of bullet proof definitions, I can probably move on knowing they already have the vocabulary they need. More likely though, I would have to move to point 2, the bullet proof definition.


2. Bullet proof definition 


A bullet-proof definition is a one-sentence summary of a key concept or idea. It should be unambiguous and should require no specific knowledge to understand. 


I get students to simply write this down. The next three steps are the important ones.


3. Examples and Non-examples


At this point I generally present students with three statements, in which some are clear examples of the word, and some are not. Student’s simply have to identify which are examples of the word, and which are not, using their whiteboards. This then leads to follow up questions to clarify their thinking, such as:


Why is this an example?

Why is this not an example? How did you know?


At this point, depending on how well the students seem to understand the word, you can even get students to generate their own examples and non-examples to test each other.


4. Use the word


Students need to be able to use the word effectively. At this point I would do one of three things -

  1. Get students to silently use the word in a sentence. 
  2. Get the students to talk about the word in a pair activity - getting them to see if they can talk about it for 30 seconds or so without stopping
  3. Get students to address certain misconceptions about the word, such as:

A student believes fascism and communism are the same, why might they be wrong?


A student believes fascism ended when World War Two finished, why might they be wrong?


A student believes fascism only refers to a selection of political parties, why might they be wrong?


This last task allows students to really think hard about the word, and crucially allows key misconceptions to be discussed before they arise.


5. Check the word


At this point, I need to fully check they have understood the word. I would therefore get them to shut their books, and generate their own definition of the word, in no more than one sentence. As long as their definition is on the same lines as the bullet proof definition, I will be happy that they have understood it. If not, I’m back to step three, with some novel examples.


6. Retrieve the word 


Importantly, it should be noted that completing these five steps successfully does not mean they have learnt the word, just understood it. If learning is a change in long term memory, then it will be crucial that as a class, we retrieve this word in the next few lessons, in new and novel contexts. 


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