A comparative study of the written vocabulary of students in grades 1-6.

Abstract

Second, although Rinsland's research is valuable, it does not reflect the changes which have occurred during the past 40 years. Some of these should be incorporated into current spelling and other language arts programs.

Three conclusions were drawn on the basis of the research. First, although additional research needs to be done comparing the two methods of counting the words, the Method 2 count appeared to give a more stable measure of the frequency of use than the Method 1 count. Some words were highly ranked in the Method 1 list which were used by few students while some words used by many students were ranked much lower.

The problems in this study were to compare two methods of determining the frequency of words used in the written vocabulary of students, and to compare the results of this research with that of Rinsland (1945). The Method 1 count involved recording each word every time it occurred in the stories, while the Method 2 count recorded the number of students who used a word.

Third, the word count in this study was too small to determine that there have been changes by grade levels. Further research needs to be done in this area.

Creative stories were gathered from 1,598 elementary students in grades 1-6 from 13 states. The final list included 164,505 words which represented 6,453 different words and their repetitions. Included in the study are tables of the 256 most frequently used words for the total count, the 100 most frequently used words at each grade level, and the words occurring in this study which were not reported by Rinsland. The final appendix also includes a complete alphabetical list of all words which were counted and their frequency of occurrence at each grade level.