Self-Selection of Vocabulary in Reading Instruction

Abstract

The child's process of learning to read was simulated by teaching adults to associate Chinese characters with spoken words. When Ss chose words to be learned, learning was more rapid than when words were selected by E from a basal reader. The results support use of self-selection of vocabulary in such methods of reading instruction as language-experience approach and Ashton-Warner key vocabulary. AN IMPORTANT issue for theories of reading instruction is that of selection of vocabulary for initial reading experiences. Ashton-Warner (2) expresses view that child himself should select words he wants to learn. She feels that even though these self-selected words may be fairly complex structurally (e.g., skeleton, alligator) their importance to child will cause them to be learned more efficiently than words chosen by a teacher or from a basal reader. This view has been incorporated into language-experience approach to teaching read ing. Stauffer (14:181) in a treatise on this ap proach states that, the best way to introduce children to skills that are functional is to use words that they have selected from their own speaking-meaning vocabularies.,, Although sev eral broad studies have been conducted which compare language-experience to other methods of reading instruction such as basal readers (1, 6), these studies do not allow separation of vo cabulary selection from other unique charac teristics of each of these methods. The purpose of present study, therefore, is to provide an independent test of relative efficacy of self selection of vocabulary for learning to read. The method chosen for test is a laboratory simulation in adults of a situation analogous to that of children being taught reading for first time. This method allows more rigorous control of variables than is possible in classroom studies and has been used effectively in past both to compare methods of teaching reading (3) and to study aspects of children's natural lan guage acquisition (5, 12).