How can I improve vocabulary across my school?

Updated 12/11/2025

Any progressive school curriculum needs to consider the place of explicit vocabulary instruction. But how do we equip all teachers to teach vocabulary, regardless of their subject?

1. Start with Teacher Training

The first stage of improving vocabulary across a school has to be literacy training for teachers. Many teachers never receive this training in their early practice. Therefore, this must be a priority for any school wanting to improve vocabulary teaching.

2. Use a Systematic Approach, Not Just Lists

The next stage is a systematic approach to the explicit teaching of vocabulary that can be used by all teachers, in every classroom—not as a bolt-on, but as a core practice.

Students’ experiences of vocabulary instruction need to be consistent across every subject. Everything we know of cognitive science and memory points us away from the memorisation of vocabulary lists and towards a methodology students can use to develop vocabulary understanding independently.

3. The Solution: Morphemic Analysis

We advocate for a strategic, systematic approach involving morphemic analysis. This is the recognition and application of the meaning of parts of words (morphemes) to interpret meaning from academic vocabulary.

Having a firm understanding of prefixes, suffixes, and stems not only supports definitions for individual words but, more importantly, it allows students to connect vocabulary and link contexts across the curriculum.

A vocabulary-rich curriculum is one that focuses on morphemic analysis, with an empowered and confident team of teachers to deliver it.

The "Golden Thread" of Your Curriculum

A teacher with the skills to explicitly teach vocabulary automatically lessens cognitive load, enabling students to decipher language in any given context. This gives students the self-belief to manoeuvre through a text without needing to memorise endless lists.

With literacy challenges on the rise, the golden thread of any curriculum should be the explicit teaching of reading and vocabulary, replicated whole-school, in every classroom.

See the Systematic Approach in Action

Our whole-class, cloud-based literacy resource, Wordology is the engine for this systematic approach.

It is designed to empower all your teachers—regardless of their subject—with a consistent, whole-school methodology for teaching vocabulary through morphemic analysis.

Schedule a demo to see Wordology in action.