'Only
100 words' needed to read
Research (2005) in primary classrooms by Jonathan Solity and Janet Vousden of the University of Warwick suggests reading schemes might not be necessary and that England's
strategy for teaching children to read could be overloading them with
superfluous words. The strategy recommends teaching
them to recognise 150 words initially but an ongoing study says 100 words will do to read most written English, including books intended
for adults. Far fewer phonic skills than in the official strategy were needed
to understand various letter combinations.
Minimal
returns
A range of books
including adult fiction and non-fiction, and two popular reading schemes were analysed. By
learning 100 key words, children found they could understand books designed for
both youngsters and adults. Being
able to recognise the extra 50 most-used words meant children gained an understanding
of only about 2% more of the texts.
The Early Reading Research project reduced the incidence of children having problems with reading from about
20-25% to less than 2%. It involved both phonics - the sound of letters and
letter combinations, and "sight vocabulary" - recognising whole words
from the letters in them.
Sounds
Written English appears to have lots of irregular words but when
analysed a significant proportion is highly regular and can be taught
through a very small number of skills.
There
are about 44 phonemes - sounds. But these are represented by a rather larger
number of letter groupings. For example, an "ee" sound might be
"ee" or "ea" or "ie".
The national literacy strategy requireds 108 of these, while the maximum possible number of associations between sounds and the
written representations of them had been calculated at 461. The Warwick approach
meant children had to learn only 61, enabling them to read around
70% of all the phonically regular words in adult literature.
The
core 100 words accounted for 53% of all the words in a database of 850,000
words analysed in the adult texts. And just 16 words accounted for a quarter of
all the words. Teaching more confuses young children.
Self-correction
For
example, the letter combination "dge", as in "fridge",
cropped up only 11 times in the 850,000 words. The letters
"ie" (which occurred 267 times in the 850,000 words) could represent no fewer than nine different sounds, so a child was left working out which was correct through trial and error.
A key feature of the Warwick scheme is "phonic self-correcting". For example, if a child is
taught that the letters "ea" have an "ee" sound, they will
initially trip over the sentence "I went to the shop to buy a loaf of
bread" - pronouncing it "breed". But they know that doesn't make
sense, so quickly correct it.
The findings were important also for adults who struggle to read - not least because they
were put off by using children's reading schemes. Tutors can now say "show us what you want to read and we'll give you the skills you
need".
The
16 most frequently occurring words:
a,
and, he, I, in, is, it, my, of, that, the, then, to, was, went, with
The
100 high frequency words:
a,
about, after, all, am, an, and, are, as, at, away, back,
be, because, big, but, by, call,
came, can, come, could, did,
do, down, for,
from, get,
go, got, had,
has, have, he, her, here, him, his, I,
in, into, is, it, last,
like, little, live, look made, make, me, my, new,
next, not, now, of,
off, old, on, once, one, other, our, out, over, put, saw,
said, see, she, so, some, take,
that, the, their, them, then, there, they, this, three, time, to, today, too,
two, up,
us, very, was,
we, were, went, what, when, will, with, you.
Source: BBC
News web site: 9 December 2005
