A Research Project Designed to Identify the Vocabulary That Students Need to Know and the Words and Phrases Educators Need to Teach

• In Event: 29.077 - Words for Schools: A Research Project Designed to Identify the Vocabulary That Students Need to Know and Educators Need to Ensure They Learn

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of our long term project investigating the vocabulary students are likely to encounter in their reading and their knowledge of these words. More specifically, the purposes of the project are (1) to identify the words that U.S. students are likely to encounter in their reading in grades K-12, (2) to assess students' knowledge of these words, and (3) to make the information available to other researchers, curriculum developers, and practitioners as they engage in research and development efforts to improve vocabulary curricula and instruction in U.S. schools.

Perspective

Vocabulary knowledge is a powerful factor underlying reading proficiency (Adams, 2010-1011, Baumann, Kame'enui, & Ash, 2003; NICHD, 2000), a central consideration in the CCSS (2010), and an especially important factor for ELLs (August & Shanahan, 2006; Goldenberg, 2013). Most scholars agree that there are a very large number of words to learn, with estimates ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 (Adams, 2010-2011; Graves, 2006; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Stahl & Nagy, 2006; Snow & Kim, 2007). Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers emphasize the importance of teaching these words (e.g., Baker et al, 2014; CCSS, 2010; NICHD, 2000). However, at the present time we know very little about which words occur in the materials students are reading and virtually nothing about which of these they know.

Data Sources

The data sources used included ~2 million running words taken from current and best selling core reading programs, ~ 2 million running words taken from current and best selling science, social studies, and mathematics elementary textbooks, the Corpus of Contemporary America English (Davies, 2008), and the Morfessor data base (Virpioja, Smit, Grönroos, & Kurimo, 2013).

Methods and Results

Methods included identifying the current and best selling core reading programs and content area textbooks using the Education Market Research database, identifying word families based on the work or Bauer and Nation (1993), analyzing the corpora using a variety of automated corpus based analyses, and running a variety of descriptive statistics on the lists created. The results will be described in the three papers following this one.

Scientific Significance

As noted above, we presently know very little about which words occur in the materials students read and virtually nothing about which words they know. The most recent tally of words in basal readers is that of Harris and Jacobson (1973). The primary source of information about words that appear in content area texts (Marzano, 2004) is based on standards documents instead of content area texts. And the most widely used word list for identifying academic vocabulary to teach U.S. school age students is that of Coxhead (2000), which comes largely from New Zealand college texts. Clearly, in order to build research based vocabulary programs and create texts at appropriate difficulty levels, we need up to date information about the words that occur in the materials students read and about their knowledge of those words.

Author

• Michael F. Graves, University of Minnesota