If older children have annual objectives to meet at work, younger children are also evaluated on their knowledge and skills, defined by school programs. This year, focus on “mastery of language, because a child needs words to express his thoughts”, said the Minister of Education Édouard Geffray on Linkedin a few days before the start of the school year.
This axis thus becomes crucial, from the dawn of schooling. “In nursery school, language development is the priority to promote academic success and reduce inequalities,” underlines the ministry on the education.gouv.fr website.
To do this, the programs have set an objective: to focus on vocabulary and ensure that all children know 2,500 words at the end of the first three years of school, by the time they arrive in CP. But what does that mean, exactly?
Where do these 2,500 words come from?
“Good lexical knowledge allows you to better understand and express yourself better. Sufficient mastery of the language is based on the use of at least 2,500 words at the end of the major section,” we can read in the new teaching program available on eduscol.education.gouv, intended for teachers. This notion, which is not new, already present in the 2025 program and discussed with teachers for several years, highlights the long-term benefits of a rich vocabulary.
“The lexicon is the main determinant of educational and cultural inequalities. Refusing any fatalism in terms of inequalities therefore first requires, in primary school as in middle school, through demanding and diligent work to broaden the lexical field of students,” explains the website of the Ministry of Education, adding that “the richness of the vocabulary conditions the understanding of texts, the quality of written productions and access to knowledge in all disciplines.”
For Elodie Pascual, speech therapist and editor-in-chief of the Allo-ortho site which provides a lot of advice to parents, having a comprehensive lexicon is important for children, for learning to read and write in elementary school, but also for communicating with others. “This allows you to be better equipped in life to speak, express yourself and understand the world,” she says.
How are these 2,500 words learned?
To help children enrich their vocabulary, teachers go through oral learning by discussing with them and asking them questions. They read stories, learn nursery rhymes. Language is also transmitted through play or sporting activities. But in addition to this – which is nothing new – they must now go through the development of corpora.
The teaching program indicates: “The teacher teaches, in small and medium sections, two corpora of words per period then three corpora in the large section; it evaluates, each month and each period, that the corpus of words taught are well memorized by the students; it implements a progression designed as a team from the small section to the large section allowing the corpora taught in previous years to be enriched with new words.”
The idea is therefore not to throw out 2,500 words from the start of kindergarten but to follow progressive learning, spread over the three years.
What are these words?
These corpora are not defined by the program but by the teachers themselves, who must choose the themes most suited to children and their ages: clothes, the house, farm animals, the seasons... While this helps to remind us of the importance of lexical background, it is not everything.
“When we do that, we develop vocabulary, but not language. Vocabulary is only part of language,” notes Manon Pilloy, teacher in small and medium-sized sections in a school in the Rhône and member of the educational sector of FSU SNUipp (unitary national union of teachers and school teachers).
She recalls in particular that before enriching his vocabulary, a child must first “dare to enter into communication”, one of the axes of previous school programs, which is not obvious for all these children from different socio-cultural backgrounds and who are discovering the school environment for the first time.
“That doesn’t mean that kindergarten teachers will stop talking to their students and will no longer put them in discourse and exchange situations,” she explains. But we have prescriptions for our teaching methods which will refocus on corpora where we will evaluate children only on words. It takes a lot of time and we can no longer develop the other essential components of language learning. »
How to enrich a child's vocabulary?
For Manon Pilloy, nothing better than dialogue. “Teachers know that children need to talk with adults but also with other children. They must hear stories, tell them themselves, by speaking, but also by putting images in order, by associating characters. There are lots of ways of speaking, there is not just one way of speaking,” she emphasizes.
For her part, speech therapist Elodie Pascual encourages parents to continue this communication at home every day: “You have to communicate with your child, read books to him, sing him songs, explain the meaning of words, expressions… You have to pay attention to language because it will have an impact on his whole life.”
