Kelly Ashley (Author and English specialist): Embedding vocabulary

In this episode, Claire talks to Kelly Ashley a former teacher and current Primary English Specialist and author. Kelly starts by explaining how she moved from America to the UK. She explains her experience of the American schooling system as a teenager and young adult. She also talks about her university journey and what options were available to her. After choosing various subjects including anthropology, sociology and child psychology, Kelly decided to choose teaching as her career. She completed a two-year teaching course in America and, after meeting her husband, made moved countries.

After qualifying and moving to North Carolina, Kelly visited different schools to secure a teaching job. She successfully found work in a large 5-form entry school as a Grade 3 (Year 2) class teacher. As she gained experience within the school, Kelly didn’t shy away from leadership roles and climbed up the ladder relatively swiftly. However, she explains how she left the school, and America, after meeting her future husband and moved to the UK.

After teaching for 6 years in America and halfway to completing her master’s degree, Kelly’s transition to the UK as a teacher was not as straight forward as she would have wished for. She was informed that she needed to requalify as a teacher to teach in the UK and she later requalified through the Graduate Teaching Programme.

In this podcast, Kelly talks about her journey as a teacher in the US and UK. She talks about the transition from the different countries as a teacher and how she became an English specialist. Throughout the podcast, Kelly compares the different schooling systems and the cultures in America and the UK. She shares the various strategies she has established and refined over the years to support children with closing the vocabulary gap, as well as aiding them to ensure they are exposed to a well-rich and well-versed environment. She talks about her book and how it can support teachers in the classroom.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Reading and writing workshop in America

In this workshop, the teacher models a piece of text and the children have the opportunity to craft a text of their own. The workshops focused on children writing about personal interests. The text is explored as a reader and writer and how language and the language features can be used to portray a certain message. The workshop did not have a text-focused approach due to the pressures of the curriculum.

Improving the vocabulary of reluctant readers

Finding a way to help children develop a love of reading can start with identifying their interests. Share stories to heighten children’s engagement. The more teachers do this, the more it will help to connect with children’s personal interests and their personal understanding. It is all about that motivation and understanding. Provide children with a range of texts and encourage them to read different texts based on their interest. Recommend different texts types and books to help children develop their vocabulary and engagement with different texts.

Closing the word gap

Talk, talk and talk. In order to close the gap for children that don’t have a wealth of language under the age of 3, it is essential to interact and communicate with them verbally. It is important to acknowledge the extent of word and text knowledge children have at the age of three. If they have not been exposed to nursery rhymes or stories, they will not have a wealth of vocabulary.

Firstly, it is important to understand the amount of talk used with children. Secondly, how we can extend the talk to dialogical talk. Dialogical talk – clarifying or asking a follow up question to an answer given or link it to personal experience and have a back and forth conversation.

Develop on children’s answers

When children respond to answers, develop and ask questions about their answers with new vocabulary. Engage and keep children interacted with the dialogue and associate words to the experience to help them broaden their vocabulary.

Drip feeding new language

Find opportunities within the classroom setting to drip feed and introduce new language. This can be through play-based learning, role play, group discussions or other methods.

Recharging: charge up the word by teaching them a new word in a variety of ways. It’s the importance of recharging that word and giving them something to do with that word later. Challenging children and giving them the vocabulary and exposing them to the rich language won’t do them any harm.

Storing vocabulary

Even after vocabulary is processed through the auditory and visual channels there is a further challenge of words coming out. There are two different types of language stores in our brain:

Receptive store – something we receive. We receive language through reading, we receive it through listening to people talk.

Expressive vocabulary store – how we express our ideas and vocabulary through writing and speaking.

Word of the day approach

Research shows, to be a fully functioning, literate adult we need to have a vocabulary store of 50,000 – 60,000 words at the age of 16. In order to achieve this, children need to be exposed to 2,000 – 3,000 words every year up to the age of 16. If a child enters the school setting at the age of 3 with a significant word gap, they are already considerably behind the average child. However, it does not mean children need to be taught 2,000 – 3,000 words a year, it means children need to be exposed to a language-rich environment as they will learn these words through talk. In addition to this is modelling and interacting through high-quality texts.

Ashley’s approach is a contextual based approach. A contextual based approach – teaching words in context to make play more engaging and interesting. After the context has been disclosed, how can the words be recharged and linked to their experience? The context must be strong and solid to ensure the word is rechargeable. The word must have a worse purpose for the children. If it doesn’t, the validity is questionable.

Orthography and Phonology

Orthography – visual or spelling. Writing a word and identifying words that start with the same letter string, i.e. ‘swamp, swing, sweat, sweater.’ Children may make a visual connection of the different words or they may make a visual connection to the last phoneme ‘mp’ i.e. bump, lamp, chomp etc.’

Phonology – sounds of the words and words that are in our language. Repeat the words in different tones and pitches, segmenting the word and getting children to repeat the word. Activate the understand of the word i.e. ‘what would and wouldn’t you see in a swamp?’

Morphology

Morphology – changing an aspect.

Morpheme – smallest unit of meaning in a word. Swamp holds meaning. However ‘swamped’ has a different meaning and has two morphemes. If we get an understanding of the root word it will help children understand the different morphemes associated with that root word. This supports the concept of word families in the National Curriculum.

Etymology

Etymology – history of words in our language. Getting children to investigate how words have arrived in our language and how they have changed over time.

BEST MOMENTS

“The American [schooling] system is really different from the UK system.”

“As soon as a I got into [teaching] I was absolutely hooked.”

“I just drove around to different primary schools with my resume and I just went into the office and said, ‘Are you looking for any teachers?’ This was literally two weeks before schools started.”

“It was a massive culture shock, educational culture shock, personal culture shock, everything.”

“I was seconded to support the North Yorkshire English team. That eventually landed to a position coming opened. I applied and then I was working as a National Strategy Consultant.”

“At the heart of it, whether you have a single age class or a mixed age class you need to be catering for the needs of all of your leaners. I think the biggest challenge for me was getting to grips with the change in curriculum and the curriculum expectations. Whilst I was in America, I was very familiar with what children needed to know and when they needed to know it. That was the challenge: more getting to grips with the expectations and what they should be achieving when. But the basic principles of understanding what are children doing and what do they need to do next, it was still applicable even though I had a mixed age class. It was thinking about, ‘how can we ensure that that offer really challenges the children in the most appropriate way?’”

“The approaches to teaching back then [in America], especially in terms of literacy were a lot more holistic. You saw a lot of things like readers’ and writers’ workshop which, really interestingly, are coming back now.”

“Education swings in roundabouts. There are some core principles, we have this great way in education of renaming the same thing.”

“I had to almost relearn how to spell certain things.”

“You could, theoretically, walk into a classroom in the US and still feel quite at home. Even though the curriculum is still quite different to how we shape the curriculum in the UK.”

 “Sharing stories to try and heighten that interest. The more that you can do to help children to connect what they are reading to their personal interests and their personal understanding. It is all about that motivation and understanding. What reading materials are they having access to? Giving them a choice.”

“As an adult it means, you need to have a good knowledge and understanding of what’s out there. Who are the new authors? Who are the authors that have been out there?”

“It’s about going and exploring books… help the child to see the connections that we can make.”

“If you hook onto an author or style that the child’s is really into, it’s really exploiting that and thinking is there something I can do here to engage the talk, engage the love of language, get them to explore that technical vocabulary… that will just open up their interest a bit more. It is about finding books that match their interest but also finding books that broaden their interest.”

“If we want to make that dialogic, we might say, ‘Oh blueberries, I really like blueberries. What’s your favourite part of your breakfast meal?’ We might ask them a follow up question or ask them to clarify or we might link them into to a personal experience. It’s that dialogue - back and forth conversation - that will help children to find themselves within language, but also to better articulate themselves.”

“Repeating that word in a sentence is called recasting, helping them to get the structure of the language.”

“Limiting vocabulary in any way is never really a good idea.”

“The speaking and repetition are really key.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

Kelly Ashley: https://kellyashleyconsultancy.wordpress.com/

Kelly Ashley Consultancy: https://kellyashleyconsultancy.wordpress.com/vocabulary-development/

Dinosaur Dig: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dinosaur-Dig-Penny-Dales-Dinosaurs/dp/0857630946

The Thirty Million Word Gap, (Hart Risley): http://www.wvearlychildhood.org/resources/C-13_Handout_1.pdf

Bringing Words to Life, (Isabel Beck) : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bringing-Words-Life-Second-Instruction-ebook/dp/B00BHYG41M/

Oli Cav: https://www.olicav.com/

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ABOUT THE HOST

Claire Riley

Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide.

Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff.

Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend.

The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.