Bringing Vocabulary to Life in High School

I have traveled and lived in enough countries to know that words on a guidebook page mean nothing unless I have formed them, and yes, stumbled through them, with my very own mouth. The same is true for our students. We know that accessing rigor means climbing the ladder of academic vocabulary.

However, due to the inherent time-poor nature of classrooms today—so much to teach and so little time—growing students’ vocabulary often becomes an exercise in memorization homework rather than the messy practice of authentic usage. Here are some routines and rituals I have used to bring vocabulary to life in the time that’s available.

Have your classroom space do some of the work

In my English classroom, I would first decide on the key vocabulary I needed my students to access regularly (literary devices and analytical verbs). Then I would make prominent word walls for each of these categories. More than just decoration, they became a part of how my students thought. I’ll never forget when one of my students came back from university to visit and told me, “I keep looking at my professor’s wall hoping to see the word bank!”

When discussing the technique of an author and the impact of a passage, I made a habit of physically looking at the appropriate places in the room. I modeled “upgrading” my analytical verb by searching through the choices on the wall and thinking aloud about which word would best fit the desired context. I made an exaggerated show of correcting myself by choosing a better word.

Eventually, my students started doing the same thing. When students were discussing a text, they would pause, look up at the wall, and work through a couple of words out loud until they found the best one. Even better, this became collaborative: Students would look up at the wall, begin thinking, and hear a peer suggest a word that would work well. This on-the-fly revision made the external word wall become part of their internal cognition system.

This is what Annie Murphy Paul refers to (in her book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain) as “spatializing” the classroom environment. Word walls, anchor charts, and personal vocabulary banks are powerful tools that extend the brain’s capacity when they are habituated as part of the communal and cognitive culture of the classroom.

Have students say the words aloud

Very few people learn a word just by seeing it and saying it only in their mind. A single exposure to a new word rarely works. Vocabulary is mastered not by knowing, but by doing.

In classrooms without a lot of time to devote to vocabulary, the best method I found was embedding quick opportunities for auditory processing. When introducing a new key word, I say it repeatedly. Then I ask students to mumble it to themselves. This mitigates the intimidation barrier that students can sometimes struggle with when learning vocabulary—of being “the weird one” who says it out loud.

Next, I ask students to say it to a peer. Then I ask students to say it together. I know choral response can be awkward in high school classrooms, but I have found that once I build a strong classroom culture, I can introduce it in a way that honors my style as a teacher and the way I connect with students. For me, this was often through humor, such as starting with a prompt like “I dare you to say….” Additionally, choral response provides students some much-appreciated anonymity to cover the risk of saying a word for the first few times.

Encourage students to celebrate the work

As students began to use the target vocabulary in their verbal contributions each class, I created a ritual that we used to celebrate one another. Every time a student used one of the upgraded analytical verbs in their speech, we would snap once—including for ourselves. In addition to helping the classroom meld as a community, this ritual yields many other benefits. It acts as a real-time, unobtrusive way to give feedback about students’ correct or incorrect usage of new words; it helps with tracking during verbal assessments; it fosters student metacognition about their own diction; and it focuses students’ listening on one another.

Create opportunities to make the work playful

As teachers, we all have our go-to vocabulary games. My favorite is a version of the Pyramid game show because it gets students up out of their seats and talking. Project a list of words on the screen that students have been learning. Put students in pairs. One partner faces the board, while the other faces their partner (not looking at the board). The student looking at the words has to give clues to help their partner guess the word without saying the word. Set a time limit, see how many words students can get, and enjoy the visible vocabulary learning!

With some careful set-up early in the year, these strategies can become seamlessly embedded into the flow of any high school classroom, helping students master vocabulary usage even when there is so little time to teach it.