FifteenWordsADay < Kitchen

08 Aug 2006 - 16:42

15 words a day

Reading E.D. Hirsch, I'm finally understanding why teachers & administrators who know what they're talking about constantly push parents to read to their children and children to read to themselves:

A well educated 12th-grader knows an enormous number of words, mostly learned incidentally. But, there is also an important place for explicit vocabulary development, especially in the early years, and especially for children who are behind. Isabel Beck and her colleagues13 in their excellent guide to explicit vocabulary instruction estimate that students can be taught explicitly some 400 words per year in school. (See “Taking Delight in Words” on page 36 for an example of such instruction.) These 400 words can be of immense importance to those children who are behind and need to be brought to the point of understanding key words as fast as possible. But that is just the beginning. If we want all of our children to comprehend well, they must learn many, many more words each year through incidental means. A 12th-grade student who scores well enough on the verbal portion of the SAT to get into a selective college knows between 60,000 and 100,000 words. There is some dispute among experts regarding the actual number so we might split the difference and assume that the number is about 80,000 words. If we assume that a child starts acquiring vocabulary at age two, and that the 12th-grader is 17 years old, he has acquired 80,000 words in 15 years. Multiplying 365 days times 15 we get 5,475 days. We divide that number into 80,000, and we find that the high-achieving 12th-grader has learned some 15 words a day—over 5,000 words a year. But of course, the 15-words-a-day estimate is just a mathematical average that describes a haphazard and complex process occurring along a very broad front.
source:
Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge—of Words and the World
American Educator
Spring 2003

the magical number 12

After 3rd or 4th grade, most of these new words have to come from a child's reading material, because he's already learned all the words grownups use in speech.

Steven Stahl summarizes what we know about how children - and adults - acquire new words:

Ordinarily, when we encounter a word we don’t know, we skip it, especially if the word is not needed to make sense of what we are reading (Stahl, 1991). But we remember something about the words that we skip. This something could be where we saw it, something about the context where it appeared, or some other aspect. This information is in memory, but the memory is not strong enough to be accessible to our conscious mind. As we encounter a word repeatedly, more and more information accumulates about that word until we have a vague notion of what it “means.” As we get more information, we are able to define that word. In fact, McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found that while four encounters with a word did not reliably improve reading comprehension, 12 encounters did.
source:
How Words Are Learned Incrementally Over Time
by Steven A. Stahl American Educator
Spring 2003

I just took a quick look at Christopher's copy of Vocabulary Workshop Level A. The word "adverse," in Unit 2, appears 6 times in 6 different contexts. Then it appears 3 times more in the Review unit.

So once Christopher is finished with Level A, he just needs to see all 300 words again 3 more times apiece, probably. That seems like a good deal to me. I'm going to have Christopher do the entire VW series, and I'm going to consider adding Wordly Wise to the mix. I've already purchased a very nice little programmed instruction vocabulary book by community college professor George Feinstein: Programmed College Vocabulary: Compact Edition (7th Edition). It's only 176 pages, so I assume the non-compact edition would be better. But Amazon had the compact edition, so that's the one I ordered.

I still want to know whether teaching Greek and Latin roots gives you a leg up. If I knew that it did, I'd order Vocabulary from Classical Roots: Strategic Vocabulary Instruction through Greek and Latin Roots by Norma Fifer, Nancy Flowers. Actually....as I think about it, I may just go ahead and order the first book and assume that "word study" is a good thing for its own sake. I hesitate only because a year ago I spent some time working with the first book and found that it's not as user-friendly as a self-teaching book should be. Too many new words are introduced too quickly, which means that you're constantly having to provide your own practice & self-testing - something I didn't feel like doing and something Christopher won't do.

Christian likes word roots, so when he started working for us two years ago I gave him my copy. But I think I'll go ahead and order a new copy and see whether there's some way I can make it work for Christopher.

In the meantime, we're chipping away at English from the Roots Up at the dinner table. We've learned 13 Greek and Latin words so far. Plus ace boon coon from the New York slang dictionary and three sheets to the wind from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.

Ed had never heard the expression before.

in a nutshell

A well-educated 12th grader knows 60,000 to 100,000 words.

This works out to 15 new words learned a day from ages 2 to 17.

By the middle grades, most of these words must be learned from written materials.

On average, students need 12 encounters with a word in 12 different contexts to learn it well enough to improve reading comprehension.

UPDATE: Engelmann says the correct figures are in the neighborhood of 30,000 words & 3 new words a day.

Mark, Doug, & Ken on Dungeons & Dragons vocabulary & SRA DI curriculum

here (scroll down)

This is sad news (scroll down):

Steven Alan Stahl, 52, died May 6 at Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana. Stahl, a UI professor of curriculum and instruction, joined the faculty in 2002. Memorials: Steven A. Stahl Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the International Reading Association, the American Cancer Society or the Entertainment Industry Foundation's National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance.

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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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.

-- KDeRosa - 08 Aug 2006

oh, cool!

Thanks!

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006

Well there is the massive problem of how you define a word.

I think capitalised words should count, as they occur in real life reading all the time. Eg "The prime minister visited Bournemouth" makes a lot more sense if you know where Bournemouth is.

-- TracyW - 08 Aug 2006

There's also the equally massive problem of how you define "know" a word. There is various degrees of knowing that might qualify as knowing.

-- KDeRosa - 08 Aug 2006

Actually, Stahl has that covered fairly well - functionally, at least.

I think he intends his '12 exposures' to take you to the point, certainly, of recognizing & understanding a word in context, and probably also of being able to offer a reasonably correct definition if asked.

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Aug 2006

Here's a good paper on Vocabulary Acquisition.

-- KDeRosa - 09 Aug 2006

This is going to sound funny, but the more I think about it, the more I realize how much vocabulary I picked up singing hymns over and over throughout my childhood.

-- KarenA - 09 Aug 2006

That doesn't sound funny to me at all. Rhyming poetry forces the author to be creative in order to rhyme while still trying to convey his message.

Plus, if you are trying to actually learn songs rather than just sing them from hymnals, you need to memorize the words. Which, you know, means that you memorize words. 8-)

-- DougSundseth - 09 Aug 2006

Looking over the list of where a lot of words are located, I was struck not only by the D & D choice, but the comic book one. But later, I realized that my son has come in to ask me about something from Calvin and Hobbes (his new obsession) and I realized how many Boomer references are there, as well as just bigger words. I found myself having to go into history over and over again so that he could follow the joke. Since he knows that there is the great pay off from getting the gist (Calvin is funny!) he listens to my explanation about 10 times more intensely.

-- SusanS - 09 Aug 2006

Karen

That's a terrific insight.

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Aug 2006

Ken - thanks for the link!

I'll get it posted tomorrow -

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Aug 2006

WebLogForm
Title:	15 words a day
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	AssessmentTests, LanguageArts
LogDate:	200608081238

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15 words a day

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