While most educators know how the Lexile Framework has contributed to the pillars of Comprehension, Phonics, Phonemic Awareness and Fluency it is critical to remember the fifth pillar, Vocabulary. MetaMetrics, led by co-founder and CEO, Malbert Smith, embarked on a collaborative research agenda a few years ago to shore up and modernize the resources and tools for vocabulary. Before our work, the most “popular” vocabulary lists were not even constructed on K-12 students, but adults. We teamed up with Dr. Michael Graves to address this deficiency by actually analyzing textbooks from the major publishers.
Vocabulary instruction is too important to rely on outdated research. Today, educators can find updated general and academic wordlists by grade at our Lexile® and Quantile® Hub (hub.lexile.com). See our research brief for a deeper look at this work.
Here are a couple of highlights:
- We found there were important academic words that appeared in our work but not in the existing lists. Of the 1,144 general academic words on our list, almost 800 did not appear on two of the most popular lists.
- A random sample of 10 words occurring on our general academic list but not on the other lists reveals a variety of words one can imagine being important for grade school learners: simplicity, appeal, circulation, plagiarism, prevent, opposite, nominative, counterargument, phrase, chronological.
Vocabulary is a pillar of literacy and growing readers need to build on their vocabulary foundation as they encounter more complex and content-specific texts. A robust vocabulary, coupled with background knowledge helps learners enjoy reading and develop into lifelong readers.
On final thought: This work in vocabulary led to a journey to examine high-frequency phrases and we did just that with Dr. Tim Shanahan. That’s next month.
And this year we have extended this work in collaboration with Dr. Tim Shanahan to provide educators with the most common 1-word, 2-word and 3-word phrases. We have labeled this free tool the 21 Century Phrase List! This high-frequency phrase list includes high-frequency phrases from an analysis of a 39-million-word corpus drawn from the most widely used current textbook series for reading/language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science in grades 1-12. The analysis resulted in the identification of 176 most frequent primary grade reading phrases that appear within core textbooks. These phrases can be used for reading instruction and assessment and are more aligned with the reading demands students face in the 21st century.
There are over 100 years of research on the importance of vocabulary in learning to read. A great resource for this subject is Dr. Michael Graves’ book simply titled The Vocabulary Book. And while there is a hundred-year history supporting the importance of vocabulary, our tools and resources for educators need to be current and instructional appropriate. We were happy to team with these collaborators to align resources to the demands of the 21st century!