Children’s Sight Words—Printed Materials or Oral Production

Abstract

The observation has been made that sight word lists based on written sources may not reflect usage of words in speech sufficiently well to produce high correlations between word frequency and word knowledge. The pur pose of this study was to determine the overlap between two word lists, one derived from written sources (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Sight Word List) and one constructed from oral language (Newman-Bailey List). The comparison shows a high degree of overlap and suggests that differences between children's spoken words and the words in school texts may be more fancied than factual. ONE OF THE tools most frequently and con sistently used by teachers to help children ex perience early reading success is the sight word list. Such a list, if carefully chosen, will aid the teacher in selecting vocabulary appropriate for initial reading instruction, language experience stories, and supplementary reading. In addition, a carefully constructed sight word list can pro vide the beginning reader with a core vocabulary of words that have high utility and that comprise the bulk of his early reading material. Sight word lists generally are based on one of two sources, either written materials or spoken vocabularies of young children. The most convinc ing rationale for selecting words from written sources is that the words, if carefully chosen from appropriate materials, will represent the words which the beginning reader will encounter most often in his reading. Such a list will include words which occur with demonstrated frequency in ma terials for beginning readers and continue to oc cur frequently in materials at higher levels of difficulty. Legitimate justification can also be found for constructing word lists based on the oral language of children. Teachers of kindergarten and pri mary grades find word lists based on oral lan guage particularly helpful in selecting high frequency and high utility words for language development. They also recognize that children more easily learn to read those words which are already in their speaking vocabularies and the meanings of which are already familiar to them. Both sources, written and oral, can be defended as appropriate, and the two should not be con sidered mutually exclusive. Indeed, one would hope that because of their similarity of purpose, their contents would overlap. Whether this over lap does in fact occur, however, remains to be determined. Carroll (2) for instance, suggests that sight word lists based on written sources may not reflect usage of words in speech suffi I ciently well to produce high correlations between I word frequency and word knowledge. In response to this and other such claims, the purpose of this paper is to examine the overlap between two word lists, one constructed from written sources and one constructed from oral language.