Vocabulary and Reading

If I had my druthers, instructional methods wouldn’t be the big deal out there. What would be the big deal is if teachers could ask themselves what does it take to learn to read? It takes phonemic awareness, it takes phonics, it takes the rapid application of those print level skills to text – fluency, it’s called. Even when they do all of those kinds of things, phonemic awareness and phonics and fluency, if kids don’t have vocabulary they won’t understand what the heck they’re reading. So, they’ve got to have vocabulary.

Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: ‘The boy kissed the ji-girl.’ That’s the way it’s supposed to work. But if the word is not in your vocabulary, you go, ji-uh-erl, jurl, jurl.

David Boulton: Right. So we’ve got whatever is going on at the decoding level, we’ve got comprehension at the other end, we’ve got to have…

Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Vocabulary.

David Boulton: The vocabulary has to be there.

Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.

Walker and her colleagues (1994) found that children’s vocabulary at age 3 years predicted their school achievement levels (reading and spelling) in kindergarten through third grade.

You know, if we just go back to the little kids we start with…now we’re starting at birth, as I mentioned, and by three years of age kids from poverty, disadvantaged, whatever their race or ethnicity, are already 30-40% percent behind in vocabulary development. You know, whereas your kids and my kids are going to learn about nine new words a day from eighteen months of age onward, kids from disadvantaged are going to learn about three. Now what happens is, they’re not learning or picking up the vocabulary, but they’re also not getting those interactions that stimulate brain, that help kids understand that our language is composed of smaller units, and we can talk about how that is so important for reading development. So, you’ve got kids coming into pre-school, kindergarten and first grade who are already behind the curve in vocabulary. Even if we could teach them to read print, what are they going to relate it to?”

Consider the kids who we don’t get to who still are having print problems that are labored, hesitant, and inaccurate as they come up through second grade, third grade, and fifth grade. Well, after fourth grade, or during fourth grade and beyond, vocabulary now enters through print. It doesn’t enter through hanging out with your friends on the corner. So, now we start to get further behind in vocabulary, such that even when the kids are accommodated for, that is books are read to them through some platform or modality and they have some type of accommodations, they still do not have the background knowledge that should have been fostered by reading from day one and we have this constant trajectory of failure with the gap widening and widening.

David Boulton: So, it’s an exercise environment. Learning to read well, once you’re doing it, opens the door to this huge opportunity to exercise your intelligence that you don’t have if you can’t read.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Right, and you won’t acquire the level of verbal intelligence in a technological society such as ours without print. That’s what is fascinating about this line of research is that people such as Hays and Aarons have looked at the oral versus print distributions of words and what you can readily see isthere are lexical items that are found in print that are not words we use in oral discourse. Because we tend to, as a society, dummy-down our language and so you would look pretentious if we began to use words such as dissipate or endeavor. Those are words that are found primarily in print.

So, where do you grow your vocabulary? You grow your vocabulary primarily in print (Fisher , Lyon) and not through oral discourse. And in order to become intelligent you have to engage in print. And so, so many children who didn’t break the break the code early, who don’t engage in it are shut out. They’re shut out of these opportunities to participate in a technological society such as ours.

Then the other work that’s kind of a fun exploration is a paper that appeared in an IRA journal a few years ago by Lawrence Baines (From page to screen: When a novel is interpreted for film, what gets lost in translation. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 39, 612-622.) What he did was to take text that had been made into movies, things like To Kill a Mockingbird, or something like that. He has the transcript of the movie, and then he has letter by letter – like here are all the words beginning with U in the movie, and here are all the words beginning with U in the book. Of course, one is a huge long list and the other is this emaciated list of fairly frequent words. And that’s important literature. Of course it’s tied to the print exposure literature that we are into, because as I said, if vocabulary is to grow beyond a certain point, by definition, there has to be exposure to words of a certain rarity.

In our study what we found was that children who made this break through, who broke the code early on in first grade, not only became better readers in high school, which is what we’d predict, but they engaged in print more. So, one of the phenomenal findings of this particular study was that ten years later we could see that those children who broke the code early on began this Matthew Effect, this cycle of engaging in print and because they engaged and were successful in it they enjoyed it and because they enjoyed it they had positive affect and so presumably they practice it more and more. Because they practice it more and more their vocabulary grew, their level of verbal intelligence increased and so when they came upon some complex ideas or complex words, vocabulary items they may not have known, they had the cognitive space to think about, well what does that word mean and then attach it to a similar word so that they can then build their lexicon in a way that allows them to progress through out time.”

…The amount of reading a person does can predict vocabulary independent of the education that they’ve had.