Vocabulary Development
The creators of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) explained that children initially develop their vocabularies through oral conversations, wherein context clues and background knowledge can help them determine word meanings:
Such conversations are context rich in ways that aid in vocabulary acquisition: in discussions, a small set of words (accompanied by gesture and intonation) is used with great frequency to talk about a narrow range of situations children are exposed to on a day-to-day basis. (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a, p. 32)
For example, most children can easily identify different parts of their face and body at a young age because their parents spend lots of time asking them where their nose, mouth, ears, hands, and feet are, using gestures to help them associate words with parts, and praising them (“That’s right! Good for you!”) when the child identifies the correct part. However, not all children have equal exposure to the same quantity and kinds of rich oral conversations necessary for early vocabulary development.
The critical role of oral conversation in the development of vocabulary was brought into sharp relief by the research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they conducted a study designed to observe forty-two young children and their families in their homes at regular intervals over the course of two and a half years (beginning at age one and concluding when the children were three or four). They concluded that “what parents said and did with their children in the first 3 years of language learning had an enormous impact on how much language their children learned and used” (Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 159). Although they found that the quality of the talk that went on in households at all socioeconomic status (SES) levels was about the same, children in higher socioeconomic families simply experienced more talk, as shown in table 1.1. Hart and Risley also found a correlation between children’s vocabulary size and their IQ scores.
Table 1.1: Correlations Between Socioeconomic Status, Talk, Vocabulary Size, and IQ Score
Source: Adapted from Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 176.
As shown in table 1.1, children whose parents talked to them more began preschool and kindergarten with larger vocabularies and higher IQ scores than children whose parents talked to them less. In 2003, Hart and Risley published “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3.” In that article, they used their 1995 data, along with further data collected on the same children in the years since the original study, to extrapolate that in the first four years of life, “an average child in a professional family would accumulate experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family 13 million words” (p. 9). The eponymous 30 million word gap between children in professional families and children in welfare families highlights the powerful role that socioeconomic status plays in vocabulary development.
Although not as extensive as Hart and Risley’s work, Erika Hoff’s 2003 study of over sixty high- and middle-SES children’s interactions with their mothers found similar results. However, she also highlighted the fact that children in higher SES families not only hear more words, but they also have more language-learning experiences around which to interact. She stated that “aspects of experience that support vocabulary acquisition are not equally available to children across socioeconomic strata” (p. 1375). When considered together, Hart and Risley’s (1995, 2003) and Hoff’s (2003) research paint a worrying picture of the vocabulary challenges that lower-SES students face.
Vocabulary progresses in rather predictable ways beyond oral conversation. For example, students develop vocabulary associated with their interests. Jill Castek, Bridget Dalton, and Dana Grisham (2012) explained that in addition to learning vocabulary through interactions with parents, siblings, and other important people in their lives, children learn new vocabulary “as a result of socialization into various communities of practice” (p. 305). A student interested in Greek and Roman mythology will probably develop a larger vocabulary of terms related to that topic than a student interested primarily in cars and motorcycles (who would probably develop rich vocabulary knowledge in that field).
One of the biggest challenges in developing academic vocabulary, like the terms important to the CCSS, is that it might not initially seem related to students’ interests. Additionally, many CCSS terms tend to be intangible and not commonly used in everyday interactions. Castek and her colleagues (2012) observed that “learning to use academic language is one of the greatest challenges of schooling because this register tends to be abstract and distant from spoken vocabulary” (p. 305). Explicit descriptions and examples are necessary to help students understand and use many of the academic vocabulary terms critical to their success in school.
Vocabulary Knowledge
In addition to their findings about socioeconomic status and vocabulary, Hart and Risley (1995) found that children with larger vocabularies acquired new words at a faster rate than other children. Andrew Biemiller and Naomi Slonim (Biemiller, 2005, 2012; Biemiller & Slonim, 2001) reported similar research:
By the end of grade 2, children in the lowest vocabulary quartile had acquired slightly more than 1.5 root words a day over 7 years, for a total of about 4,000 root word meanings. In contrast, children in the highest quartile had acquired more than 3 root words a day, for a total of about 8,000 root word meanings. (Biemiller, 2012, p. 34)
According to Loren Marulis and Susan Neuman (2010), a slower rate of learning new words leads to a “cumulative disadvantage over time” (p. 301). Here we review three areas affected by this disadvantage: (1) reading ability, (2) independent reading, and (3) mental processes.
Vocabulary and Reading Ability
The nature of the cumulative disadvantage described by Marulis and Neuman (2010) becomes clear when one considers vocabulary’s effects on learning to read and reading comprehension. Michael Kamil and Elfrieda Hiebert (2005) described the process of learning to read as follows:
Beginning reading instruction is typically accomplished by teaching children a set of rules to decode printed words to speech. If the words are present in the child’s oral vocabulary, comprehension should occur as the child decodes and monitors the oral representations. However, if the print vocabulary is more complex than the child’s oral vocabulary, comprehension will not occur. (p. 3)
Students who have large oral vocabularies will recognize and understand more of the words they are asked to decode, which in turn allows them to more fully comprehend the passages they read. The importance of vocabulary knowledge in learning to read was emphasized by the National Reading Panel’s (NRP) 2000 report, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. Concerning vocabulary, the NRP (2000) reported:
Benefits in understanding text by applying letter-sound correspondences to printed material come about only if the target word is in the learner’s oral vocabulary. When the word is not in the learner’s oral vocabulary, it will not be understood when it occurs in print. Vocabulary occupies an important middle ground in learning to read. Oral vocabulary is a key to learning to make the transition from oral to written forms. (