In the past teachers have had little or nothing to do with the selection
of the widely differing vocabularies which they have had to teach. The
best of our teachers have attempted to select a reasonable list from the
spelling book which has been provided. That selection, however, has been
limited by the spelling book in use, the vocabulary of which has already
been selected, and may or may not be a reasonable one. The question may
even be raised, “To what extent can teachers intelligently select the
vocabulary which should be taught?” In 1914 teachers of the city of
Boston chosen from all the elementary grades, were asked to make a
selection of words fitted for their respective grades. The significant
thing in their report was that the second grade teachers chose not only
words which should be taught in the second grade, but also words which
eventually should be taught in each later grade; and many teachers of
the eighth grade selected words which should have been taught in a
previous grade. “Always,” for example, was in the list of one or more
teachers of every grade, I to VIII inclusive. Many other words were in
the lists of teachers of several grades.
In 1916 Jones’s “Hundred Demons” (see page 22, Part III) were given to
forty-five second grade teachers for them to select the words which
should be retained in the second grade. Seventy-nine of these words are
among Ayres’s “Thousand Commonest Words in the English Language.” Every
word was voted to be retained by one, or more than one, _second_ grade
teacher as suitable to be taught to second grade pupils.
A group of twenty-eight prospective Boston teachers, who had had some
experience in the grades as practice teachers, and much experience in
observation, was asked to arrange the following list of words in the
order of their difficulty:
ache
enough
direction
company
business
hoped
ocean
muscle
sentence
whether
The directions given were to place the easiest word, in so far as its
spelling difficulty was concerned, first, and the most difficult word
last, the others to be arranged according to the difficulty of each.
After the several lists were collected it was found that each of the ten
words had been classed as most difficult by some one, and each of the
ten words had been classed as least difficult by some one.
Thus all the investigations tend to show that teachers are not able to
select words according to their difficulty. The difficulty can only be
found by experimenting with thousands of children and by laboriously
correcting and tabulating the results. Fortunately we have a number of
such investigations, so that the assignment of words to a certain grade
need not be wholly dependent upon the judgment of an individual teacher,
but upon the results obtained from testing thousands of children by a
number of different skilled investigators.