Selection of a Vocabulary
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.