The Academic Vocabulary of Elementary-Grades Core Disciplinary Textbooks

• In Event: 34.077 - Moving Toward a Multicomponent Model of Vocabulary Learning in School

Abstract

Purpose

The research questions were: (a) How do general-academic words from elementary textbooks compare to two prior general-academic word compendia derived from texts intended for adults (Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2014)? (b) How do elementary textbook domain-specific words compare to another compendia of elementary grade domain-specific words obtained from standards documents (Marzano, 2004)?

Perspective

Academic vocabulary refers to words used primarily in the disciplines such as science, history, or mathematics (cf. Beck et al., 2013; Gardner & Davies, 2014). Academic vocabulary exists in two categories: general-academic vocabulary that is used across multiple disciplines and domain-specific vocabulary.

Academic vocabulary has received increasing attention, especially as a result of the Common Core emphasis. Educators and publishers tend to choose academic words based on a word’s redundant use in multiple contexts (e.g., Lesaux et al., 2010; Nagy & Hiebert, 2011). Although existing academic word compendia have been touted as useful (even for elementary grades) for selecting such recurrent words, two compendia, Coxhead’s (2000) and Gardner and Davies (2014), are derived entirely from adult texts. A third by Marzano (2004) was created by inspecting national standards’ documents, not by direct examination of texts. In short, to date, virtually nothing is known is about academic vocabulary exposure in elementary grades textbooks.

Data Source and Methods

Data source. Twelve contemporary first- through fifth-grade core textbook programs, four from each of three disciplines—science, social studies, and mathematics—made up the data source. The textbooks were all United States best-selling programs (Education Market Research, 2014). The texts were digitized.

Computational academic word selection. Through computational analysis, general-academic words occurred at least 100 times in the entire corpus, appeared relatively more frequently in textbooks than in oral language (Brysbaert & New, 2009), had concreteness measures of four or higher (Brysbaert et al., 2014); and did not occur disproportionately in any of the three domains. Domain-specific words occurred at least 100 times in the entire corpus and 50% more frequently than expected in a given domain (as compared to frequency of occurrence in the entire corpus). Computational decisions for whether a word was a domain-specific (or general-academic) word were validated by two human judges, for a subset of 20% of the corpus words. Reliability was 75%.

Comparison to prior lists. The resulting word lists were compared with the three respective prior academic word compendia, and percentage of overlap was calculated using the computer-based lists as the base comparisons.

Results/Conclusions

(a) Only a moderate percentage of elementary general-academic words overlapped with the two prior compendia derived from adult materials. (b) For each of the three disciplines there was a moderate percentage of domain-specific word overlap between the elementary textbooks and Marzano’s lists.

Scientific/Scholarly Significance

Because previous academic word lists rely on texts intended for adults or are not derived from a text corpus, the current study results provide a more relevant academic vocabulary compendia that could be useful to elementary teachers and publishers as they select academic vocabulary for instruction, for texts, and/or for assessments.

Authors

• Jeff Elmore, MetaMetrics

• Jill Fitzgerald, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Michael F. Graves, University of Minnesota

• Heather Hughes Koons, MetaMetrics

• Ian F Hembry, MetaMetrics