A Basic Sight Vocabulary

Abstract

Teachers of all grades, from Grade II on, find pupils who have very small or no sight vocabularies. The teachers wish to remedy this condition by drilling on the sight words that will be of most value to these children in their reading. But which are those sight words? The vocabulary of a particular primer will not do because the child's reading is now chiefly in books other than the basal series with which he started and also because the vocabularies of most primers contain many words that, though needed at the primer stage, are later not of general usefulness. No standard word list will do because all such lists contain five hundred words or more, too many to be given drill as a sight vocabulary. In view of these facts, it may well be assumed that the most essential of the words that are basic to children's reading, and therefore needed as a sight vocabulary, will surely be included in all the best lists of words used by children. A comparison of those lists was therefore the logical means of securing a basic sight vocabulary. The first list considered was naturally the vocabulary published by the Child Study Committee of the International Kindergarten Union,' which is a summary of many studies in this field. This list contains 2,596 words, which are the most frequent of 7,000 different words found to be known to children before entering Grade I. It was found that, if the words of a frequency of 1oo or more (inflected forms being combined) were chosen from this list, a total of 510 words was secured, which is about the number of words on the other two lists which were used. The second list was the first five hundred of the