Next month (July 2025) Alice Deignan, Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Leeds, will be speaking at our annual Secondary education conference about how teachers can support the vocabulary transition of pupils from primary to secondary school.
Transition from primary school to secondary school can be an exciting but daunting time. When pupils are making the next significant step in their learning journey, there are often challenges that arise with adapting to new ways of learning and unfamiliar vocabulary.
Professor Alice Deignan, alongside Marcus Jones, is the author of New Words, New Meanings, a book which emerged from Alice's ESRC project, Linguistic Challenges of the Transition from Primary to Secondary Schools. The book shows teachers how they can make the language of their subject less daunting and more accessible for all students.
Ahead of her keynote speech at our Secondary conference on 7 July, Alice and her co-author Marcus Jones, have written a helpful blog post sharing some of Alice's research and exploring the nature of the language challenge students face in early secondary school, and how they can be supported to manage this transition.
Choosing the right tool for the job
Imagine you are going to plant out some flowering plants for summer, then, when you've finished, relax with a cup of tea. You have two tools available: a trowel and a teaspoon. Naturally, you use the trowel for the garden job, and the teaspoon to stir your tea. Is a teaspoon intrinsically better than a trowel, or perhaps the other way round?
Of course not - it's a question of which is right for the job at hand, and the choice is not difficult. The same principle, 'get the right tool for the job', applies to most language choices, but it seems many pupils do not feel like that.
What do pupils think about language?
We interviewed 30 year 6 pupils from 5 different schools, in groups, about their feelings about their impending transition to secondary school. This included questions related to the language of school. In every interview, the pupils mentioned the importance of using 'good' words. They explained these as 'better', 'high level', 'formal', 'advanced' and 'posh'. Here, Sam has been explaining how he uses a thesaurus to find better words.
- Researcher: what do you mean by a 'better' word?
- Sam: a synonym
- Lily: so it's the same word but a different one
- Sam: and it [the thesaurus] has different meanings underneath but better words
- Lily: high level words
- Researcher: How do you know if a word is high level?
- Sam: It sounds more posh kind of
They will have learned about synonyms and antonyms, and levels of formality as part of SATs preparation, but somewhere along the way, they have picked up the idea that some words are 'better' than others. By implication, their everyday language is 'worse', and lacks value.
In her January blog post, Catharine Driver wrote that we acquire two Englishes, one at home, and an academic English at school. Unlike our home language, academic English is something we have to learn consciously, and sometimes get wrong. Maybe this is why pupils think it is in some way intrinsically better, rather than simply 'better for this purpose'.
Academic language is not 'the same but better'
Academic or formal words are not superior versions of an everyday word. Linguists know that two different words are almost never exactly the same and hence often prefer to say 'near-synonym' rather than 'synonym'.
The pupils we interviewed gave colossal and humungous as synonyms for big, but the three words do not mean exactly the same thing, and each is used in different contexts. Also, many words that are new to pupils around the transition convey precise concepts that we don't distinguish in everyday language, so amphibian and mammal don't have everyday equivalents.
This doesn't make children's everyday language 'worse'; it's just different. Their informal spoken language can express emotion and humour in a way that academic language simply can't. Our interviews with pupils were full of quick humour, like the following exchange. These year 6 children are talking about their fears about older pupils in secondary school, and playing on the multiple meanings of big (generous vs physically large):
- George: [imitating an adult] just be the bigger person and walk away
- Daisy: yeah but if you walk away they're gonna do something like they're all bigger than you
- George: get stilts
Nuance, humour and language play like this are so common we barely notice them, but they are highly skilled.
Everyday language is the perfect tool for this job-- that is what it has evolved for. It should never be under-valued, talked about as 'worse' than academic language.
How to support children learning academic language
We know that children need to learn academic language to access disciplinary-specific concepts, but this raises difficult questions like: How can we make sure that learning academic language doesn't make them feel that their home language is inferior? How can we help pupils towards a more subtle understanding of the different languages they will use in different aspects of their lives?
How we respond to children's own language seems important. If a pupil comments that an army took over a country rather than invaded, we would ensure to praise the idea and nudge towards the term used in the disciplinary language of history. We can develop this scenario, to support the 'different tools for different jobs' understanding of language(s).
For instance, we could briefly explore the use of those words and related ones like march in and trespass in different contexts-- a conversation with friends; the classroom; a news report.
We can talk about which word might fit each context best, and why certain words don't work as well in some contexts, but importantly, we think, without value judgments. In doing so, we hope to extend pupils' awareness of the academic languages they will need, while recognising the language skills they already have.
Find out more
There is still time to book to come along to our Secondary conference on 7 July, where you will get the chance to hear more from Alice Deignan alongside other speakers and workshop sessions on literacy in secondary education.
Or explore our mixture of free and premium transition-focused resources and check out this SecEd article from our Head of School Improvement about supporting disciplinary literacy in Year 7 pupils.
You can also find out more about our Secondary CPD training courses.