Selection of a Vocabulary through Investigation
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 |