FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Running head: FAIP-R TECH REPORT Analysis of Word Lists for FAIP-R (Tech. Rep. No. 1) Katherine Pratt Margaret Martin Mary Jane White Theodore J. Christ University of Minnesota Draft: 11-04-09 The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grants R324A090038(FAIP) & R30SCOSOOS9 (MITER)at the University of Minnesota (PRFs #s ____ & 473473). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the U.S. Department of Education. FAIP: Formative Assessment and Instrumentation Procedures for Reading MITER: Interdisciplinary Education Sciences Training Program 1 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Table of Contents Word Lists ............................................................................................................... 3 Defining Sight Words ......................................................................................... 3 A New Model for Sight Words ........................................................................... 3 Initial Sight Word List Development .................................................................. 5 Word Fluency Tests and the Development of Graded Word Lists ..................... 6 Nonsense Word Tasks......................................................................................... 8 Suggestions for Best Practices ............................................................................ 9 References ............................................................................................................. 10 Appendices .......................................................................................................... 122 Glossary of Terms ................................................................................................. 13 Tables .................................................................................................................... 14 2 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Word Lists This technical report contains a review of definitions of sight words, the development of sight word lists, and practices for grade-leveling word lists. Based on the review of the literature in the area of word list fluency, recommendations for best practices in the development of word list fluency assessments for beginning readers are made. Defining Sight Words Most researchers ascribe to a dual-route view of reading- words are either recoded phonologically or recognized immediately by sight. “Sight words” is a term often used in early literacy instruction but the term is poorly defined. Different researchers have different interpretations. Examples of such definitions by researchers are that sight words are “words that a child can recognize instantly on sight,” (Savage, 1973) or a word one recognizes “because he has seen it many times and knows how it looks” (Jones, 1971). An even broader view that some researchers take is that sight words are words that an individual can read “without preliminary preparation” (Jones, 1971). A New Model for Sight Words Ehri (1992) provides a new model for sight words, positing that readers at different skill levels utilize different cues to decode words as they read. While previous definitions of “sight words” rely on the recognition of a word’s visual appearance, Ehri presents this as simply the primary phase in a multi-phase development process. In the Logographic Phase, or Visual Cue Reading, readers use arbitrary visual cues to form connections between words and meaning. According to Ehri, they are accessing visual-meaning connections. She offers examples of such cues as “a circle at 3 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 the end (e.g., hero), or two tall posts in the middle of the spelling (e.g., yellow)… or a logo behind a word as in McDonald’s printed on golden arches” (p. 124). While letters may be selected as cues, Ehri emphasizes that it is for their visual properties rather than for any connection between the letters and pronunciation. Students who have greater phonemic awareness and greater knowledge of letter shapes, sounds, and names shift into the Rudimentary Alphabetic Phase, or Phonetic Cue Reading. This phase is characterized by visual-phonetic connections rather than visualmeaning connections. Students use knowledge of letter sounds or names to form systematic connections between some of the letters in a word and the word’s pronunciation. This systematic connection, rather than an arbitrary one, is a crucial distinction between the Rudimentary Alphabetic Phase and the Logographic Phase. Another important distinction between the two phases is the shift from the primary connection being between a word and its meaning to a word and its pronunciation. In the Mature Alphabetic Phase, also known as Cipher Reading, students form a connection between the entire sequence of letters of a word and its pronunciation. It is at this stage that individuals shift from visual-phonetic connections to visual-phonemic connections. Students are not only recognizing sounds that correspond with individual letters, but rather “conceptualize the pronunciation as a sequence of phoneme-size units” (Ehri, 1992, p. 133). Because of this continuum of skill acquisition, Ehri argues that “The kinds of words that are learned by sight are not limited to high frequency and irregularly spelled words. Rather they include all words that have been read often enough to initiate the formation of connections into memory” (1992, p. 137). 4 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Initial Sight Word List Development The development of sight word lists tends to be based on word frequency lists. The Dolch list and Fry’s Instant Word List and New Instant Word List are all developed from contemporary frequency counts of “running words,” the total number of words in a text. The authors argue that the most important words for students to learn are those that they will have to read the most, which are those with the highest frequency count (Fry, 1957), and those that appear in multiple frequency lists (Dolch, 1936). Both Dolch and Fry recognize the limitations in basing their work solely on frequency counts, so the word lists they constructed are supplemented with other complimentary and functional words. Both authors added words that they felt should be included (Fry, 1957; Dolch, 1936). Words added included service words, such as “danger” and “poison,” and words that the researchers judged to fit with context groupings. Additionally, researchers make a distinction between “form” words and “function,” or “structure” words. Form words are nouns, which are considered to be of limited use. Both Dolch (1936) and Fry (1957) recommend discarding them from a frequency count because they are tied to specific ideas and are not universal. There is disagreement about what constitutes function words. According to Savage, their purpose is to “show grammatical and syntactical relationships within sentence patterns” (Savage, 1973). What is agreed is that “they include pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, articles, prepositions, and other ‘minor’ word classes.” Even in small numbers, function words make up a large percentage of running text. According to Fry’s calculations, the first 10 words presented in his “New Instant Word 5 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 List” make up about 24% of all written material, while the first 100 words make up approximately 50%. All 300 words on Fry’s New Instant Word List compose about “65% of all the words written in English” (Fry, 1980, See Appendix A). Even researchers who agree that frequency counts are the most effective means of determining what words should be considered the most important do not necessarily agree on the corpus from which frequency counts should be determined. Some lists are based on grade level materials, implying that they should reflect the material that children encounter in their learning environment (Dolch, 1936), while other researchers argue that sight word lists should reflect word counts found in adult literature since that is the end goal of literacy education (Johnson, 1971). Word Fluency Tests and the Development of Graded Word Lists There is little agreement about what words students should be expected to know at which grade level, based largely on a lack of information regarding word difficulty (Rinsland, 1946). Word list developers primarily draw words from two sources: established frequency counts and basal readers. Leveling words has been addressed by field testing words that were randomly selected from graded vocabulary lists to ensure that they had been placed at the appropriate level. An example of such testing is seen in the development of the Informal Reading Inventory, Sixth Ed. (Burns & Roe, 2002). Words were assigned to a level if >80% of students at that level were able to pronounce it, <80% of students at the level immediately below were able to pronounce it, and >80% of students at the level above were able to pronounce it successfully. Similarly, the San Diego Quick Assessment (La Pray, 1969) and the BASIC Reading Inventory (Johns, 1997) contain graded word lists 6 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 with words chosen from basal reader glossaries and word frequency lists, with levels determined from the source of the word and from student’s responses during field testing (See Appendices B and C). The Stieglitz Informal Reading Inventory (Stieglitz, 2002) constructed its graded word lists by randomly sampling words appearing on both the Basic Reading Vocabularies (Harris & Jacobson, 1982: words from 8 basal reading series) and A Cluster Approach to Elementary Vocabulary Instruction (Marzano & Marzano, 1988: words from elementary school textbooks). For the kindergarten word lists, three exceptions were made to include words from the Harris and Jacobson list that were not found on the Marzano and Marzano list. Stieglitz does not offer an explanation for these exceptions. Words were field tested using a Graded Words in Context Test form; however the Graded Words in Isolation Test (See Appendix D) was not piloted. The development of the EasyCBM graded word fluency measures are well documented (Alonzo & Tindal, 2007). Words from word frequency lists (including the Dolch) and online grade-level word lists were administered to students and analyzed using Item Response Theory. In the Rasch model used, words with mean square outfits in the acceptable range were compiled into a word bank and ranked based on relative difficulty. Words for which a reliable standard error of measurement could not be obtained were also omitted (See Appendix E). Another approach to creating grade leveled word lists is to examine the phonograms contained in high frequency words and creating words from the phonograms (Ekwall, 1989). Ekwall analyzed the phonograms in the Basic Reading Vocabularies, which draws from eight basal readers written at a second grade level with reading grade 7 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 levels ranging from kindergarten to fourth grade. Ekwall only included phonograms found in multiple words and excluded phonograms in words judged to be of low utility. From the phonograms, one-syllable words were generated to create a graded phonogram list (See Appendix F). The Systematic Instructional Management Strategies (SIMS) Reading and Spelling Program is a structured phonics sequence that encompasses and defines major coding concepts (Blackburn, Dickson, Millam, & Nelson, 1977) (See Appendix G). In addition to listing words in groups by phonetic concepts, the SIMS materials include lists of sight words (See Appendix H). These words are not easily decodable or words whose importance and utility justify teaching them before their phonetic concepts. Compton, Appleton, and Hosp (YEAR) found that percentage of high frequency words in second grade reading probes is a unique predictor of accuracy of text reading. Percentage of high frequency words also contributes to passage-reading fluency, as does passage decodability (the levels of decodable words present in the passage). Levels of decodable words are described and summarized in Appendix I. Nonsense Word Tasks Ehri & Wilce (1983, as cited in Ehri, 1992) found that skilled readers were able to read familiar words at the same rate as they were able to name single digits, much more quickly than they read nonsense words. She suggests that the visual-phonemic connections readers had formed with familiar words allowed them to read the words by sight. If readers had never encountered the nonsense words before that particular task, as is likely, these connections would not exist and the words would have to be recoded 8 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 rather than recognized at sight. Therefore, word list tasks involving nonsense words and highly decodable words of high frequency may require different skill sets. Suggestions for Best Practices Two common themes emerge in the creation of graded word lists: pooling and discarding words. Words are pooled from texts either at random or by using frequency count data. The pool is often supplemented by the addition of words judged to be of utility or of similar quality of the existing pool. Then the pool is narrowed by discarding words through qualitative or quantitative procedures. Field testing provides a means of evaluating the difficulty of items and information for assigning words to various grade levels. The choice of words is largely at the discretion of the researcher. The available literature suggest that sight words (defined as high frequency words) and easily decodable words would be most appropriate for first grade word lists. Field testing words and performing item response analysis will ensure that word list items are grade appropriate. 9 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 References Alonzo, J., & Tindal, G. (2007). The Development of Word and Passage Reading Fluency Measures for use in a Progress Monitoring Assessment System (Technical Report # 40). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Behavioral Research and Teaching. Blackburn, M., Dickson, P., Millam, W., & Nelson, K. (1977). Systematic Instructional Management Strategies (SIMS) Reading Program Manual. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Public Schools. Burns, P. C., Roe, B. D. (2002) Informal reading inventory: Preprimer to twelfth grade, sixth edition. Houghton-Mifflin. Compton, D. L., Appleton, A. C., & Hosp, M. K. (2004). Exploring the Relationship Between Text-Leveling Systems and Reading Accuracy and Fluency in SecondGrade Students Who Are Average and Poor Decoders. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 19(3), 176-184. Dolch, E. W. (1936). A basic sight vocabulary. The Elementary School Journal, 26(6), 456-460. Ehri, L. C. (1992). Reconceptualizing the development of sight word reading and its relationship to recoding. In P. B Gough, L. C. Ehri & R. Trieman (Eds.) Reading Acquisition (pp. 107-143). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Ekwall, E. E. (1989). Locating and correcting reading difficulties (5th ed.). Columbus, Ohio: Merrill Publishing Company. Fry, E. (1957). Developing a word list. Elementary English, 34(7), 456-458. Fry, E. (1980). The new instant word list. The Reading Teacher, 34(4), 284-289. 10 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Johns, J. L. (1997). Basic Reading Inventory: Pre-Primer through Grade Twelve & Early Literacy Assessments. Seventh Edition. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Johnson, D. D. (1971). The Dolch list reexamined. The Reading Teacher, 24(5), 449-457. Jones, D.M. (1971). Teaching children to read. New York: Harper & Row. La Pray, M., Ross, R. (1969). The graded word list: A quick gauge of reading ability. Journal of Reading, 12(4), 305-207. Rinsland, H. D. (1945). A basic vocabulary of elementary school children. New York: The MacMillan Company. Savage, J. F. (1973). Linguistics for teachers: Selected readings. Chicago: Science Research Associates. Stieglitz, E. L. (2002). The Stieglitz Informal Reading Inventory: Assessing Reading Behaviors from Emergent to Advanced Levels, Third Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 11 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Appendices 12 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Glossary of Terms 13 FAIP-R Tech Report 1.0 Tables 14