Why vocabulary is worth the attention
The English side of the assessment covers comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Vocabulary quietly affects most of them: a child who does not know a word in a passage loses the sentence, then sometimes the question.
It is also the slowest thing to build, which is exactly why it should start early and stay gentle.
Reading does most of the work
Word lists teach words in isolation. Reading teaches them in use — with the surrounding sentence doing the explaining, and the word turning up again often enough to stick.
Twenty minutes of reading a day, of something your child actually wants to read, will do more for vocabulary over a year than any list. Fiction with some age above their reading level is ideal: enough unfamiliar words to stretch, not so many that it becomes work.
Teach the habit of working a word out
Children meet unfamiliar words in the paper itself, and cannot look them up. The useful skill is not knowing every word — it is being unbothered by not knowing one.
- Read past it. The rest of the sentence usually narrows the meaning.
- Look at the parts. Prefixes and suffixes carry a lot: un-, dis-, -less, -ful, -tion.
- Ask what kind of word it is. Knowing something is a describing word often gets a child close enough to answer.
Practise this out loud while reading together. It is a habit, not a fact, so it needs rehearsing rather than memorising.
Work on the words that keep appearing
Some words earn their place because they turn up in questions rather than passages — the words that tell a child what to do. Infer, suggest, imply, describe, compare, opposite, most likely. A child who is confident with these loses fewer marks to misreading the instruction.
Little and often, with the words in context
- Keep a running list of words met while reading — five a week is plenty.
- Use each one in a sentence about something your child cares about. A word attached to a real thought is remembered; a word attached to a definition is not.
- Come back to old words occasionally. Spacing them out is what moves them into long-term memory.
What to skip
Long lists of obscure words, learned the week before, do very little. If a word is rare enough that it needs cramming, it is rare enough that it probably will not decide the outcome — and the time is better spent on comprehension, where the marks actually sit.
Read next
- What a standardised score actually means
- Exam technique for the Transfer Test
- The week before, and the day itself
Dates, scoring and assessment details are set by SEAG and can change — always confirm the current position on the official SEAG website. Our key dates page lists the 2026–27 milestones.