A most important investigation of the vocabularies of children has been
made by Dr. W. Franklin Jones of the University of South Dakota. Dr.
Jones studied 75,000 themes written by children of all grades from the
second to the eighth inclusive, gathered from three different states,
and averaging a little less than 190 words each. The number of themes
per student ranged from 56 to 105. The total number of words amounted to
nearly 15,000,000.
Among the important results of this investigation the following stand
out significantly:
1. Out of the 15,000,000 words used there were only 4,532 different
words used by more than 2% of the pupils. (_5,000 carefully selected
words are, therefore, probably sufficient for pupils to learn in the
first eight years of school._)
2. The number of words listed per pupil ranged from 431, the smallest
vocabulary in the second grade, to 2,812 for the largest vocabulary of
an eighth grade pupil. This does not necessarily mean that 3,000 words
are sufficient for the spelling vocabulary of children in our schools.
The fact that the various investigators disagree to some extent in the
vocabularies which they find, is enough to prove this point. There are
many factors, such as home conditions, nationality, and locality, which
may affect the number of words that will be used. However, when the
number is increased to approximately twice the largest single vocabulary
found, all of the common words of the best investigations will have been
included.
3. The average number of words in the written vocabulary of each grade
is as follows:
Grade 2 521
Grade 3 908
Grade 4 1,235
Grade 5 1,489
Grade 6 1,710
Grade 7 1,926
Grade 8 2,135
_Jones shows that the writing vocabulary of children is comparatively
small. This narrows our spelling problem within correspondingly small
limits._
4. Of the 4,532 different words the number used by at least 2% of the
pupils in the respective grades was as follows:
Grade 2 1,927
Grade 3, new words added 469
Grade 4, new words added 442
Grade 5, new words added 432
Grade 6, new words added 425
Grade 7, new words added 419
Grade 8, new words added 418
—————
4,532