Teachers are encountering increasing numbers of children with stunted vocabularies – haunting many pupils from primary to secondary school – and they fear “vocabulary deficiency” will hold them back educationally and socially.
In response some schools said they had adopted approaches such as highlighting pupils’ use of informal words such as “innit” and encouraging them to improve and widen their use of language.
A survey of 1,300 primary and secondary school teachers across the UK found that more than 60% saw increasing incidents of underdeveloped vocabulary among pupils of all ages, leading to lower self-esteem, negative behaviour and in some cases greater difficulties in making friends.
The report, commissioned by the Oxford University Press, found the word gap for many pupils remained “stubbornly high” at secondary schools, where teachers say they have less time and fewer resources to tackle the problem.
“This is significant because while language development is a key focus in early years education, relatively little research has been conducted into language deficit as children progress through secondary education,” the report’s authors noted.
Secondary school teachers said that vocabulary deficiency held back pupils’ progress not just in English but also across a range of subjects, including history and geography.
Those with a low vocabulary were also less likely to do well in national tests such as GCSEs, struggling to understand instructions and questions included in papers.
Worringly, a third of secondary school teachers reported a widening vocabulary gap between the first and last years of secondary school. The majority of teachers surveyed blamed declining numbers of children reading for pleasure for shrinking vocabularies, especially among older pupils.
Kate Nation, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, said that language variation in children was complex and difficult to attribute to a single cause.
“Regardless of the causes, low levels of vocabulary set limits on literacy, understanding, learning the curriculum and can create a downward spiral of poor language which begins to affect all aspects of life,” Nation said.
Both primary and secondary teachers agreed that the impact on pupils was potentially severe, with more than 80% agreeing that children with vocabulary deficiency were likely to have lower self-esteem.
Teachers from schools with a high proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals were more likely to encounter children with low vocabularies but experts who contributed said the results suggested limited vocabulary was “a general problem and not specific to any one group of pupils”.
Greater involvement by parents was seen as the key to helping children improve their vocabulary, according to a majority of teachers.
In response, a Department for Education spokesperson said: “Every child, no matter what their background, should be able to master the basics of reading and writing. But still, too many children from disadvantaged backgrounds start school with poorer vocabulary and language skills than their better-off classmates.
“That is why we are taking action to tackle the word gap once and for all – and earlier this year we announced a £26m network of specialist English hubs around the country, along with a £5.7m fund to improve literacy and numeracy in early years and primary education.”
Another report - from the Education Policy Institute and UCL Institute of Education - found that England has a poor track record in improving the educational attainment of its most disadvantaged pupils compared with developed countries such as Canada and Denmark.
The report found that selection by ability, for grammar schools or classroom streams or sets, widened the performance gap between better-off pupils and those from poorer backgrounds.
“Our research finds that high performance and greater equity in educational opportunities and outcomes are not necessarily mutually exclusive,” the authors said.
The best performing countries “tend to have policies which avoid selection by ability and segregation between schools. They also tend to have a significant focus on attracting, supporting and retaining high quality teachers.”
