English Vocabulary Clinic – Summaries, varied sentence starts and witches
Support your students towards better language use with the help of our resident word-wizard, Alex Quigley…
- by Teachwire
Try this today: six-word summaries
It’s important that our students read strategically, especially when the vocabulary proves tricky. A helpful strategy to ensure students can comprehend a tricky classroom text is to summarise when they read. The simple act of summarising, verbally or in writing, can make what you have read more memorable, whether it is a science explanation or a poem in English literature.
A quick, challenging way to summarise are ‘Six-word summaries’. This concise writing effort gets pupils thinking really hard about what words to use to sum up what they have read. They have to consider every single word carefully, which has attendant benefits for their writing skills.
Cracking the academic code
Academic writers appear to seamlessly write in a serious style that is well-organised and fluent. If they’re to do the same and do it well, our students will need some prompts and starts.
Varied sentence starts are the glue that knits sentences together, making arguments flow in history or explanations clear in art. We should model and scaffold such sentence starters.
In history, you may be writing an essay about changes in Elizabethan England. Sentence prompts like ‘Due to this…’, ‘Consequently…’ and ‘A direct consequence…’ will help our pupils vary their sentences, but also think like more like historians, exploring consequences and changes over time.
One for: biology students
Phagocyte Derives from: Greek ‘phago’, meaning ‘to eat’ and ‘cyte’, meaning ‘cell’ Means: A cell that consumes surrounding debris, such as dead cells and other microorganisms
Related terms: ‘Macrophages, monocytes and granulocytes
Note: The Greek origins of phagocyte offer biology students a concrete and memorable story to make a complex term understood
I don’t think it means what you think it means…
Significant In mathematics = unlikely to have occurred by chance
In English or art = something of importance, worthy of attention
One word at a time
Some small words have a big, rich history. One such word is ‘hag’ – commonly used to describe old women in a derogatory fashion, it originally derived from a description of witches, being linked to the German ‘hex’, meaning ‘witch’.
Like many words in the history of the English language, ‘hag’ is sexist and misogynistic, reflecting a masculine control of our language to represent women negatively. Used by Shakespeare in Macbeth in to describe the ugly, inhuman witches, the word is now used more generally, but has become no less unpleasant. Though a small word, it reflects a bigger attack on women throughout our history.
Alex Quigley is a former teacher, author of the upcoming book Closing the Reading Gap (£16.99, Routledge) and national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation
