Reading recovery and the vocabulary knowledge of young children

Abstract

This study investigated whether vocabulary was a major problem for young ESL learners in Reading Recovery. To answer this, a corpus of books used in Reading Recovery and junior classrooms in New Zealand was compiled and analysed. A word list of the most frequent and widest range words in the corpus was created. The vocabulary from the corpus was composed largely of high frequency vocabulary. Using a sample of items from this list, a picture vocabulary test was made and trialled. The test contained 84 words in fourteen groups of six and learners were tested on all of the six items in each group. The test was administered to 75 young children from primary schools in the Wellington area on a one-to-one basis. The children included both ESL learners and native-speakers of English. Very few learners had problems with vocabulary in the assessment with most scoring full marks or close to full marks. There was a ceiling effect with the picture vocabulary assessment so a future study could develop further assessment with lower frequency vocabulary or a productive vocabulary assessment could be used. In order to gain further information about how vocabulary was affecting children's reading, data was collected about the children using a range of reading related measures and was written up as a series of case studies. It seems that 6 year old children who were born in New Zealand or who have been in New Zealand for one or two years are likely to have a large enough vocabulary to cope with learning to read in English. There may of course be other sources of difficulty for such children.