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