This longitudinal study looked at the sight word development of young children across their first year of schooling. The development is compared to measures of reading and spelling ability taken near the end of the children's second year at school. Estimates are made of what might be considered a normal sight word vocabulary for children at the middle and end of Year 1. Also included is an analysis of the sight words acquired which was used to produce a pedagogical list of words that the children in this study found easiest to learn.
'Word identification' is a broad term and involves the use of any cues to determine a word.
'Word decoding' is more specific and involves the application of letter sound knowledge to determine a word.
'Word recognition' is a step up from decoding and requires a level of mastery that permits speed and automaticity (LaBerge and Samuels, 1974). Recognition may occur via either a visual memory link or some superfast automatic decoding process but the key point is the speed. Words are recognised immediately on sight, hence the use of the term 'sight words' for words determined in this fashion.
The lack of research specifically monitoring sight word development is probably due to the dominance, until recently, of either 'phonic' or 'look and say' philosophies. From the phonic stance such a project would be unnecessary because the children, once taught the key, could unlock a multitude of words. From a look and say stance such a project would also be unnecessary because the structured word teaching which goes with such a philosophy directly controls sight word development, i.e. the children learn the words they are taught and that are in the controlled readers.
With the recent swing in reading instruction to more individual freedom and independent reading from a wide range of unstructured literature, a need now exists to identify some normal range for children's sight word vocabulary development. The whole language reading approach which has dominated reading instruction in recent years, often coupled with multi-age classrooms, allows children to develop reading skills at their own rate. However, many teachers of young children would appreciate some means of determining whether a beginning reader's progress is inside a normal range. Traditional standardised tests that were developed and normed under a different set of educational beliefs and practices may not be appropriate. However, something as fundamental as a check of overall sight vocabulary should have universal application. ,
There are other teachers of reading at the moment who would not welcome this interest in isolated word knowledge. McKenna, Robinson and Miller (1990) discussed this conflict between the whole language perspective and the traditional perspective. They reported that testing of specific decontextualised skills such as the recognition of isolated words is a particular source of irritation for whole language teachers because such assessment does not require students to demonstrate the full range of their ability. Whole language teachers have a different construct of what should be assessed which includes areas such as student motivation, self efficacy, creativity and general problem solving (Mosenthal, 1989). However, as Adams (1990) explains, while reading is a whole complex system of skills and knowledge 'unless the processes involved in individual word recognition operate properly, nothing else in the system can either.' (p.3).
In the development of the above lists there seems to have been no consideration given as to how easily children would learn to recognise the words. If we are wanting to make reading an enjoyable process for students and if we were wanting to make their early efforts successful, pedagogical lists should contain words that will be easily acquired as sight words. Of course frequency of occurrence is a major factor in word recognition. It is widely reported that words of higher frequency are recognised more rapidly than non-frequent words (Seidenberg et al, 1984; Ehri and Wilce, 1983). So for this reason the above lists should be reasonably easy. However, there are other factors as well as frequency of exposure that can influence the ease of acquisition. One of these is the level of imagery word, such as 'of' (Hargis Terhaar-Yonkers, Williams and Reed, 1988). There are also perceptual features of words that may set them apart from others. Teachers have long known that the two 'eyes' in the middle of 'look' make it an easily acquired word. There may also be relationships between letters such as bigram troughs (Rapp, 1992) that children's orthographic processors learn to recognise so that the presence of known subword units in new words could assist their acquisition as sight words. Due to these factors, it would seem timely to actually research which sight words children acquire first and, logically, most easily.
Question 1: | What is the range of sight vocabulary development that can be considered normal at the middle and end of Year 1? |
Question 2: | Which words seem to be acquired most easily as sight words by the children? |
The teacher involved had an eclectic approach to reading instruction using a combination of whole language methods with some traditional skills emphasis.
A list of 417 words was developed to include the words that would most likely be the first to enter the subject's sight word vocabulary. Many sources were consulted to develop the list, including Holdaway's Basic Sight Words, Hillerich's Starter Words, the New Zealand Council for Educational Research's Alphabetical Spelling List (NZCER, 1968), the Dolch List and the Dolch Commonest Nouns, Sartain's Comprehensive Reading Vocabulary, the American Heritage Word Frequency Book (Carroll, Davies and Richman, 1971), and the vocabulary in level one of the Story Box reading scheme, which is the main scheme used in the subjects' classroom. Most word lists emphasise irregular sounded words, so to even this out, some high frequency regular words were selected for inclusion as well. Also included are the following words that might have been acquired through exposure to environmental print: Lego, Brisbane, Coca Cola, Give Way, McDonald's, Westpac, Rochedale, Sesame Street, Australia and Hungry Jacks. 'Jesus' and 'God' were included due to some of the families of the subjects being active in fundamental Christian groups. Some regularly inflected forms and their base words were also included in the list such as 'ask' and 'asked', 'boy' and boys', and 'go', 'goes' and 'going'.
Children were asked to read through the list (organised roughly into increasing difficulty) until they were unlikely to give any more correct responses. Only one word at a time was exposed to a child, with the other words being masked. As this process took some time with each subject, the sessions were ended when a subject appeared to be losing concentration and continued from that point on a later day.
The list was tested at three stages during the first grade year, in February, June and November. For a word to be regarded as part of a child's sight word vocabulary, the correct response had to be given within two seconds. Responses after that time were recorded, as were any signs of sounding out, but such words were not counted as sight words. If there was no response within ten seconds the next word was shown.
Reading comprehension
The St Lucia Reading Comprehension Test (Elkins and Andrews, 1974), a cloze test, was administered to the subjects in a class group in October of their second year at school.
Spelling
The Schonell Spelling Test (Schonell, 1965) was administered to the subjects in a class group in October of their second year at school.
Student | Words February | Words June |
Words November | Reading Comp. |
Spelling |
1 | 0 | 14 | 149 | 22 | 31 |
2 | 0 | 5 | 55 | 1 | 19 |
3 | 1 | 19 | 56 | 3 | 22 |
6 | 1 | 22 | 129 | 23 | 33 |
7 | 0 | 17 | 170 | 22 | 32 |
8 | 0 | 1 | 31 | 10 | 15 |
9 | 2 | 20 | 119 | 8 | 25 |
10 | 3 | 61 | 270 | 28 | 29 |
11 | 2 | 51 | 366 | 26 | 31 |
12 | 1 | 26 | 207 | 18 | 27 |
13 | 0 | 20 | 69 | 13 | 24 |
14 | 4 | 70 | 311 | 33 | 42 |
16 | 0 | 14 | 158 | 15 | 32 |
17 | 5 | 21 | 215 | 19 | 29 |
18 | 0 | 14 | 101 | 9 | 22 |
Mean | 1.27 | 25.00 | 160.40 | 16.67 | 27.53 |
Standard Deviation |
1.62 | 19.84 | 98.44 | 9.31 | 6.64 |
SEM | 0.42 | 5.12 | 25.42 | 2.40 | 1.72 |
The mean number of words recognised as sight words in November of the first year at school was 160. If one considers a standard deviation either side of this as a normal range then sight word vocabularies of between 60 and 260 words could be considered as the average range. However, there may be words that students knew that were not included on the list and near the end of a session subject fatigue may have been a factor so it would be advisable to err on the side of caution. It must also be remembered that individuals develop at different rates and that a slower rate is not necessarily an indication of a problem. In the light of these factors a reasonable estimate for the average range of sight words recognised at the end of Year 1 would be 50-300 words.
Similarly, a reasonable estimate for the average range of sight words recognised in the middle of Year 1 would be 5-50 words.
The correlations existing between the measures used in this study are shown in Table 2. The strong correlation between the sight words known in November and the reading comprehension measure lends support to the belief that as more words are recognised automatically, more cognitive resources are available to process higher order processes such as comprehension.
Words February |
Words June | Words November | Reading Comp. |
Spelling | |
Spelling | 0.4692 (p = 0.078) |
0.6742 (p = 0 006) | 0.7410 (p = 0.002) | 0.8405 (p = 0.000) | |
Reading Comp. | 0.5023 (p = 0.056) |
0.7645 (p = 0.001) | 0.8336 (p = 0.000) | ||
Words November | 0.6448 (p = 0.009) | 0.8492 (p = 0.000) | |||
Words June | 0.6693 (p = 0.006) | ||||
Words February |
This list of the most easily acquired words could be used by teachers to give assistance to students who are not developing a sight vocabulary at an acceptable rate. Words that occur both on this list and in whatever reading material the student is using should be selected as the basis for additional activities designed to develop recognition ability. It seems logical to expect that these words should be the easiest for the student to acquire to expand their sight word vocabulary. As a general rule, reading teachers try to provide successful learning experiences for students. The list of the 100 most easily acquired words may be a useful tool for reading teachers trying to achieve this goal.
18.99 | I | 1 | 16.91 | me | 26 | 13.9 | tour | 51 | 12 | hat | 76 |
18.87 | six | 2 | 16.7 | we | 27 | 13.5 | my | 52 | 12 | him | 77 |
18.96 | to | 3 | 16.5 | it | 28 | 13.3 | bed | 53 | 12 | book | 78 |
18.95 | a | 4 | 16.3 | egg | 29 | 13.3 | little | 54 | 12 | eight | 79 |
18.94 | up | 5 | 16.2 | big | 30 | 13.2 | play | 55 | 12 | went | 80 |
18.92 | two | 6 | 16 | down | 31 | 13.1 | like | 56 | 11.3 | do | 81 |
18.91 | too | 7 | 16 | sun | 32 | 13.1 | red | 57 | 11.1 | away | 82 |
18.8 | in | 8 | 15.7 | dog | 33 | 13.1 | girl | 58 | 11.1 | good | 83 |
18.8 | he | 9 | 15.5 | see | 34 | 13.1 | doll | 59 | 11 | took | 84 |
18.8 | look | 10 | 15.3 | pig | 35 | 13 | going | 60 | 11 | had | 85 |
18.5 | you | 11 | 15.2 | not | 36 | 13 | children | 61 | 11 | where | 86 |
18.5 | at | 12 | 15.1 | can | 37 | 13 | have | 62 | 11 | please | 87 |
18.5 | jump | 13 | 15.1 | school | 38 | 13 | ten | 63 | 11 | so | 88 |
17.96 | is | 14 | 15.1 | this | 39 | 12.7 | here | 64 | 11 | by | 89 |
17.84 | one | 15 | 15 | box | 40 | 12.3 | cat | 65 | 11 | make | 90 |
17.93 | the | 16 | 14.9 | off | 41 | 12.3 | some | 66 | 10.3 | cow | 91 |
17.91 | come | 17 | 14.5 | Mum | 42 | 12.2 | get | 67 | 10.3 | be | 92 |
17.9 | and | 18 | 14.5 | five | 43 | 12.2 | Dad | 68 | 10.3 | mother | 93 |
17.8 | are | 19 | 14.2 | fish | 44 | 12.1 | they | 69 | 10.2 | an | 94 |
17.6 | for | 20 | 14.2 | am | 45 | 12.1 | no | 70 | 10.1 | your | 95 |
17.6 | go | 21 | 14.1 | all | 46 | 12.1 | home | 71 | 10.1 | boys | 96 |
17.5 | said | 22 | 14.1 | yes | 47 | 12 | seven | 72 | 10.1 | got | 97 |
17.2 | she | 23 | 14.1 | his | 48 | 12 | nine | 73 | 10.1 | will | 98 |
17.1 | into | 24 | 14 | cup | 49 | 12 | house | 74 | 10.1 | out | 99 |
16.97 | three | 25 | 13.91 | on | 50 | 12 | hot | 75 | 10.1 | tree | 100 |
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Please cite as: Greenup, J. (1992). The Sight Word Vocabulary Development of Year 1 Children. Queensland Researcher, 8(3), 19-28. http://www.iier.org.au/qjer/qr8/greenup.html |