08 Aug 2006 - 19:03

Engelmann on how many words a day

Ken left this passage from Engelmann in the Comments thread to 15 words a day:


Engelmann thinks that Hirsch's estimates are way too high. He think's it's more like 30,000 words total and 3 new words a day.

The numbers: Hirsch selects 60,000 as the number of word meanings for the top-of-class student. I did a very unscientific experiment that may be way out in left field, but I came up with a smaller number. I didn't have a top-of-class high-school student handy, but I had a top-of-class graduate student. I opened a college dictionary that had about 70,000 entries to four random pages. I read the words, spelled them, told her the part of speech for those she questioned, and asked her if she knew what they meant. On three of the pages, she did not know all the words. On one page, she did not know bourn, bourrée, bouse, boustrophedon, bouzouki, bowerbird, bow pen, bowsprit. She also didn't know a second meaning of bower (a bow anchor). She probably didn't know bovid, but I gave her half credit. "Could that be something related to a bovine?" "It is an adjective for bovine."

Also, I did not present most capitalized entries because I didn't think they were fair (Bournemouth, Bow bells, Bowditch, Bowen, Bowie State.) I did present Bowie and Bowling Green. I did not present six entries because they were either dialect, slight variations of the same word (two bowman entries for instance), obsolete, or spelling variations (bowlder for boulder). The page had 58 entries. Eleven were discards. Of the 47 remaining, she missed 9.5 (half credit for bovid). So her score on that page was 37.5/47 or 80%. Her performance on the other pages was 100%, 65%, 39%. The low-scoring page had lots of sodium words, which she could identify only as a substance composed of sodium. (She got sodium chloride, sodium fluoride, sodium glutamate, and Sodium Pentothal, but she was not able to identify the others.) Also, I threw out a lot of items on this page-variant spellings, obsolete words, capitalized words I didn't know and that seemed trivial, affixes, and obscure slang words. She also missed sociometry, socal, socman, sokeman, sodalite.

Indeed my decisions were less than operationally delineated, but if we assume that 15% of the entries are not fair and that the top-of-class person would get average 80% on the others, the total number would be something on the order of 48,000, which is quite a bit less than 60,000. Personally, I don't believe it's that high. Also of interest is that a very extensive analysis of morphology for spelling, conducted in the '70s, came up with a number of 30,000 words that seemed to be fairly exhaustive.

At least some cognitive scientists favor this range over the one that Hirsch suggests. Biemiller and Slonim (2001) concluded that the learning rate of new words for the top-of-class student is more on the order of about 3 words per day, not 8-18. So there seems to be far from perfect consensus on number of words. Also, Biemiller endorses explicit, direct instruction. So there isn't perfect consensus on methods for inducing vocabulary.

Three new words a day sounds much more likely to me, based on nothing more than instant reaction.

I just noticed that Ken is back on the job!

Can't wait to read.

Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading a day?
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
Vocabulary Workshop levels & grades
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006

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WebLogForm
Title:	Engelmann on how many words a day
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	DirectInstruction, LanguageArts
LogDate:	200608081501