\u201cIf you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.\u201d<\/em> \u2015 Yogi Berra<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Brilliant minds have expressed Yogi Berra\u2019s sagacity for eons (but I think he said best). And after reading this page, you will have an amazing understanding of where you are going. Furthermore, you will be able to help your students understand their vocabulary goals.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s begin by examining a compact list of vocabulary facts that provides an overall foundation for what follows.<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0<\/span> How many words do students know when they enter kindergarten? Answer:<\/span> About 5,000 to 10,000 words.<\/p>\n 2.<\/span>\u00a0 How many words do students know when they graduate high school? Answer:<\/span> About 50,000 words.<\/p>\n 3.<\/span>\u00a0 How many words do students need to learn each year? Answer:<\/span> About 3,500 words each year or about 10 words every day.<\/p>\n 4.<\/span>\u00a0 How many different words will students come across in their textbooks in grade K-12? Answer:<\/span> About 88,500 different words.<\/p>\n 5.<\/span>\u00a0 How many words are in the English language? Answer:<\/span> About 400,000 active words, or about 500,000 lexemes. With scientific and technical words included, it\u2019s well over 1 million lexemes.<\/p>\n 6.<\/span>\u00a0 How many different words did Shakespeare use in his writing? Answer:<\/span> 31,534 different words.<\/p>\n 7.<\/span>\u00a0 How many different words did Shakespeare know? How large was his vocabulary? Answer:<\/span> About 66, 534 words.<\/p>\n 8.<\/span>\u00a0 How large is an average adult\u2019s vocabulary? Answer:<\/span> At 20 years old, it\u2019s about 42,000 lexemes. It grows thereafter at about 2 lexemes per day.<\/p>\n So, those are the facts based on a whole host of studies. Let\u2019s now take a closer look at a few of these studies and create some context for these numbers.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div><\/div>\n Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n In this section, we will move on from just numbers. We will place those numbers in context, and we will also look at some teaching-vocabulary wisdom along the way.<\/p>\n Cal State Northridge Reading Institute for Academic Preparation<\/strong><\/em> provides a nice overview of the research. In addition to this, they address the fact that students can\u2019t learn all of the words that they need to learn through direct instruction: \u201cThe average 3rd grader knows 10,000 words. The average 8th grader knows 25,000 words. The average high school graduate knows 50,000 words. Do they learn 40,000 words in 9 years via direct instruction? No way!\u201d<\/p>\n No way? The reality is that students learn most of their vocabulary incidentally through reading, writing, speaking, and listening, both in school and out of school. However, vocabulary development is one of the five key components of effective reading instruction. Furthermore, the research supports the fact that teachers must take action in many ways to help students learn all of the words they need to learn.<\/p>\n In Promoting Vocabulary Development: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction<\/em> (2000)<\/strong>, the Texas Reading Initiative presents slightly lower numbers than other sources: \u201cWe know that, on average, students add 2,000-3,000 words a year to their reading vocabularies. This means that they learn from six to eight new words each day\u2014an enormous achievement. Individual differences in vocabulary size also involve large numbers. Some fifth-grade students may know thousands more words than other students in the same classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, students who enter school with a small vocabulary and students who don\u2019t acquire vocabulary words as needed face an uphill battle, as it lowers reading comprehension, and may lead to a Matthew effect<\/a><\/strong>, in which struggling students fall further and further behind.<\/p>\n The next source targets the Common Core State Standards, so it is especially relevant. As the title indicates, our goal is to make sure that our students graduate high school with a 50,000-word vocabulary. In Teaching 50,000 Words: Meeting and Exceeding the Common Core State Standards for Vocabulary<\/em> (2013)<\/strong>, Graves and Sales said, \u201cThe Oxford English Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 2009) lists more than 400,000 active words, and achieving students learn a substantial number of these words. Based on the work of Nagy and Herman (1987) and a number of other scholars, our best estimate is that typical students enter kindergarten with vocabularies of 5,000\u201310,000 words and graduate from high school with vocabularies of something like 50,000 words. This means that students are learning approximately 10 words a day.\u201d<\/p>\n One basic fact about acquiring vocabulary is that it takes multiple exposures to make new words stick. We rarely learn a word the first time we encounter it. This means that in order to learn those 50,000 words, students will encounter many more words than that. In How Many Words Are There in Printed School English?<\/em> (1984)<\/strong>, William E. Nagy and Richard C. Anderson said, \u201cProjecting from this sample to the total vocabulary of school English, our best estimate is that there are about 88,500 distinct words.\u201d Students will need a variety of vocabulary skills and strategies to deal with so many unknown words. Clearly, using context clues when reading is essential.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n To add a little perspective, I decided to find out a bit about Shakespeare\u2019s (1564-1616) vocabulary. After all, one would imagine that Shakespeare had a great vocabulary.<\/p>\n In The Story of English<\/em> (1986)<\/strong>, McCrum and MacNeil say, \u201cShakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, some 30,000 words. Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about half this, 15,000.\u201d<\/p>\n Here is a different approach and a different set of numbers. In Estimating the Number of Unsen Species: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know?<\/em> (1976)<\/strong>, Efron and Thisted say, \u201cShakespeare wrote 31,534 different words, of which 14,376 appear only once, 4,343 twice, ect.\u201d However, by using statistical inference models, they estimate that \u201c35,000 is a reasonably conservative lower bound estimate for the amount of vocabulary Shakespeare knew but didn\u2019t use.\u201d This means that Shakespeare\u2019s total vocabulary was about 66, 534 words.<\/p>\n Compared to our students\u2019 targeted 50,000-word vocabulary, those numbers seem a little low to me. But on the other hand, we learn the easy and common words first. The words get more complex and less common as we continue to learn words and move through life. What did the last thousand words that Shakespeare learned look like? They were probably very uncommon and advanced words.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n As mentioned above, in The Story of English<\/em> (1986)<\/strong>, McCrum and MacNeil say, \u201cEstimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today vary, but it is probably about\u2026 15,000.\u201d That certainly doesn\u2019t compute with all of our other estimates on vocabulary, especially our 50,000-word goal for our students.<\/p>\n In How Many Words Do We Know?<\/em> (2016)<\/strong>, Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, and Keuleers crunched the numbers using data from a large scale crowdsourcing experiment and came up with this: \u201cBased on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days. The knowledge of the words can be as shallow as knowing that the word exists. In addition, people learn tens of thousands of inflected forms and proper nouns (names), which account for the substantially high numbers of \u2018words known\u2019 mentioned in other publications.\u201d<\/p>\n As the above study illustrates, the internet is becoming an interesting force in measuring vocabulary. I recently took a couple of the on-line vocabulary tests to see what they were about and to add additional perspective to all of the statistics I have come across.<\/p>\n Keep in mind that the people taking these internet-based tests do not form a representative sample. Every person who takes a test is a person who is interested enough in vocabulary to want to take a vocabulary test. By the way, TestYourVocab.com<\/strong><\/em> states: \u201cMost native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000\u201335,000 words.\u201d<\/p>\n http:\/\/testyourvocab.com\/<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n https:\/\/my.vocabularysize.com\/<\/a><\/strong><\/p><\/div><\/div>\nQ&A: A Summary of Vocabulary Facts<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Do you teach beginning writers or struggling writers? If you do, be sure to check out Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay on the homepage! It is the fastest, most effective way to teach students organized multi-paragraph writing\u2026 Guaranteed!<\/span><\/a>\nHow Many Words Do Students Need to Learn?<\/span><\/h3>\n
A Little Perspective: How Many Words Did Shakespeare Know and Use?<\/span><\/h3>\n
A Little Perspective: How Many Words Do Most People Know?<\/span><\/h3>\n