Bring new words back six times this week
A word taught once on Monday is gone by Friday. Vocabulary sticks through repeated, varied encounters, and those have to be planned.
Oct 28, 2026 · 1 min read
The default vocabulary routine, define it, write it down, move on, teaches words the way a single glance memorises a phone number. Beck, McKeown and Kucan (2013), in Bringing Words to Life, argue that word learning needs frequent encounters across varied contexts, and that the biggest payoff sits in tier-two words: high-utility academic words like 'contrast', 'estimate' and 'reluctant' that appear across subjects but rarely in everyday speech. Pick fewer words and engineer the encounters instead.
In practice
- Introduce with a friendly definition in everyday language, one example and one non-example: 'reluctant means you don't want to; is a dog reluctant about dinner?'
- Plan the returns when you plan the week: in a starter, in your own questioning, in a homework sentence, in a different topic entirely.
- Make students produce the word, not just meet it: 'answer using the word estimate' costs nothing and counts as an encounter.
- Keep a short live-words wall, five or six at a time, and retire words deliberately once they survive a spot check.
Quick takeaway: choose fewer words and plan their returns.