The Oxford Wordlist Top 500 - Oxford University Press
The Oxford WordlistTop 500High frequency words in youngchildren’s writing and readingdevelopmentProfessor Joseph Lo BiancoJanet ScullDebra Ives1
Prefacehe Oxford Wordlist Top 500, An investigation ofhigh frequency words in young children’s writingand reading development, was conducted in Australianschools in 2007. This study was the first of its type inover 30 years.TThe Oxford Wordlist has been presented as a resourcefreely available to all Australian educators and thispublication, the Oxford Wordlist Top 500, High frequencywords in young children’s writing and reading development, isthe analysis of this data.Wordlists that consider and connect the words used byour broad student community to the classroom increasetheir relevancy as they are included and referred to inreading, writing and spelling lists. Following repeatedrequests from educators to be provided with an up-todate list that reflects Australian students of today, OxfordUniversity Press Australia conducted an extensive andrigorous study to find those words most frequently usedby students in their first three years of school in theirown writing. The research was designed by ProfessorJoseph Lo Bianco and Janet Scull from the Universityof Melbourne, and they continued their involvement byanalyzing the final data.In this revised publication of the research study, we’veincluded the Oxford Wordlist ‘Top 500’ words to enableeducators to extend vocabulary development andpractice with students in their first three years of school.2What cfrom an weleatchildren he wor r ndsear luiest se in theirsamplewr iting? s of
IntroductionWhile there is extensive research into children’sspoken language development, and of their earlyreading, children’s writing appears to be less welldocumented. Building from this premise OxfordUniversity Press conducted the research reported below,An investigation of high frequency words in youngchildren’s writing and reading development, and from thisproduced the Oxford Wordlist.The general aim of the research was to document thewords children first write, to examine these choicesaccording to a range of children’s demographiccharacteristics, and to explore what these word choicesindicate about children’s personal identities and socialexperiences. This research on the words children writeshould therefore be understood in the context of thecomplex and mutually reinforcing growth of children’slanguage: speaking, listening, reading and writing andtheir educational, social and personal worlds.What can we learn from the words children use in theirearliest samples of writing? What do the words youngwriters use reveal about children as writers and alsoabout the individual person, his or her subjectivity andinterests? What can we infer from the word selectionsthat children make about the influences on them;influences such as gender, social or familial opportunity,ethnic and linguistic background and place of residence?What do children’s word choices tell teachers about theteaching of reading and writing? These are some of themany questions raised when conducting and interpretingthe Oxford Wordlist research.In the most general, and ideal, terms infants learnlanguage first by learning nouns. This is a process ofnominalizing, i.e. naming the world that surrounds them.These nouns that name the world are then qualified,described, given agency, organized and arranged, in otherwords they are put to work, meeting the child’s growingneeds for communication. In this way children converta naming tool into an instrument for social interaction,in turn confirming language as the deepest and mostreliable tool a child has available for controlling his orher world. Infants are supported in their early languagegrowth by a veritable cottage industry of targetedcommunication. Practically every adult engages verballywith infants, tutoring them in their growing languagecompetence, indulging or correcting errors, providingcontinuous communication. This is a many-to-one profileof communication between intimates and a dependentchild. In this scaffolded and attentive environmentchildren develop grammatical accuracy, lexical range andsocio-cultural appropriateness.School involves a radically different communicationprofile. Here the supportive environment directedat a single child is reversed into a one-to-manycommunication profile. In classrooms children becomemultiples, rather than single targets of directedcommunication, they become ‘students’ and enter formalrelationships with adults who are no longer intimatesbut professionals in loco parentis. The single source ofcommunicative input, the teacher, must divide his or hertime among many learners.In schooling the astonishingly complex process oflanguage acquisition is further extended into literacy.Speaking and listening are connected through meaningfulinteraction and reading and writing elaborate theseprimary language processes into formal routines ofknowledge acquisition. The speaking/listening pairis complemented by the reading/writing pair withone being mostly productive and the other mostlyreceptive. Schools therefore extend the primary languagesocialisation of the home and induct children into thetwo literate equivalents of home communication: readingand writing. Reading, like listening, involves absorbingthe messages of others; writing, like speaking, involvesusing the most elaborate manifestation of language tocommunicate messages to others.As young children learn to read they draw heavily ontheir spoken language repertoire, as they learn to writethey draw heavily on their reading skills. There is a closerelation between the particular language skill beingacquired and the one already mastered, i.e. the rangeand nature of each skill that children have under controlinforms and stimulates subsequent skill development,in an organic, cumulative and mutually reinforcing way.Both of the receptive skills (what they understand ofthe language of others, especially teachers, parents andpeers) are analogues of their productive skills (what they3
produce, in speech, proto-writing and early writing).Reading is a source of language input and writing isa form of language output; each skill grows in mutualrelation to the other.In the beginning stages children read words that mosteasily fall within their spoken language experiences andthis holds true of what they write. Over time the strictinterdependency between speech and writing, alongwith the relation between concrete and abstract ideas,diverges, and so too does the curriculum of schools.Each involves tools that serve to mediate the experience:pens, paper, keyboards and ever more integrated digitaltools. All encapsulate the expanding codes that storesymbolic information and are delivered through diversemodes of communication and come to represent evermore sophisticated meanings (Lo Bianco and Freebody,2001).Comparisonwith otherwordlistsHow do the Australian research studies, and inparticular the Oxford Wordlist, compare withother English language research of this kind? In order torespond to this question, it is important to emphasize thatthe Oxford Wordlist differs fundamentally from manyother lists in its collection methods. It is based onchildren’s usage, words they know orally andvisually, rather than being derived from a study of wordsin children’s reading texts. In this way, the Oxford Wordlistdiffers from a recent United Kingdom database of wordsgathered from children’s reading texts, as reported byStuart, Dixon, Masterson and Gray (2003).In common with Oxford Wordlist research, Huxford,McGonagle and Warren (1997) examined changes inhigh frequency wordlists over time by comparing thewords used in 1254 free writing samples collected from 4,5 and 6 year olds with three lists in common usage in theUnited Kingdom, namely those of Edwards and Gibbon(1964), Fry (1980) and Reid (1989). These writers foundtotal agreement on more than 50% of the words from thecomparison lists. It is also interesting to note that thereis a 75% agreement between the Huxford et al’s top 100words used by English children, representing research4conducted in the late 1990s in the United Kingdom, andthe present Oxford Wordlist of words written by Australianchildren in 2007.The most cited of all wordlists is however the Dolchwordlist of basic sight vocabulary (1936). This wasderived from a compilation of children’s oral vocabularyand words commonly found in young children’s readingmaterials. Although these data were collected in the1920s and early 1930s and a comparison of the 220words of this list with the top 220 words on the OxfordWordlist reveals an agreement level of only 54%, this notonly reflects changes in language usage over time, it isalso related to Dolch’s decision to exclude all nouns. 60of the top 220 words on the Oxford Wordlist are clearlyidentifiable as nouns.The Oxford Wordlist has been prepared from a databasefar larger and more representative than any Australianand most international predecessors, using text samplesgathered naturalistically from free writing practice inregular classroom operations. It seeks to respond to allthe above needs: to inform teachers of the research basebehind the development of texts, to assist in informedtext selection, to record and analyze changes andpatterns of children’s word use in writing for the wholepopulation and a group of sub-population categories, andto allow teachers to expand children’s writing languagerepertoire by comparing and contrasting an individuallearner’s performance with the words used by their peers.The research, as we have noted, also offers insight intopatterns of culture across Australia, so that changes inchildren’s lives are reflected in what children choose tosay to the audiences to which they direct their writtenwords.In thechild beginninmost ren read w g stageseasilyordsfallwithi thatspokenexpenr ienc languag theiresetr ueof wh and this hoat they wr i ldste.
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Research methodologyand designThe principal aim of the Oxford Wordlist researchwas to gather a sufficiently large and representativesample of children’s ‘free’ writing to facilitate differentiatedanalysis of some key characteristics. As a result, themethodological challenge was to generate a samplesufficiently large to permit reliable analysis of bothoverall and sub-group characteristics, and to elicit thesample texts in asnaturalistic a way as possible.Moreover, it was essential to tap into children’s authenticwriting in such a way as to uncover both what is commonto all young writers and what differentiations exist.The research was intended to be cross-sectional, ratherthan longitudinal, and so few comments are made aboutdynamic aspects of children’s word usage, other thanreferences to what can be gleaned from comparisonwith previous research on children’s early written words.The cross-sectional, point-in-time sampling permits theresearchers to observe contemporary Australian Englishin use in the most de-contextualized and elaborate of thefour main language skills.It was decided to restrict the sample to the writingpractices of children in the first three years of school.The main demographic differentiations investigated weregender, socio-economic status, language background andlocation. Feasibility constraints determined populationsize and spread, so that it was decided to gather writingsamples from 1000 children in two states, Victoria andSouth Australia. Relevant processes were followedto gain permission from the governing educationalauthorities allowing researchers access to schools.Proportions for each of the selected demographic factorswere calculated using the Australian Census figures (ABS,2007), enabling participant numbers in each of thesecohorts to be broadly reflective of its representation inthe whole Australian population.Five writing samples were collected from participatingchildren in the first year of school and three samplesfrom children in the second and third years of school.The reason for collecting five writing samples from firstyear students was to provide a similar overall total wordcount to that which would be yielded from the samplescollected from samples in years 2 and 3. To preserve as6naturalistic a process as possible, sample collection wasallocated to classroom teachers who were requested toconserve texts produced by their students during regularwriting sessions. In this way, the children were also free touse the writing tools and aids regularly available in theirclassrooms and this facilitated their use of the words theywanted to write rather than being limited to those wordsthey could or were asked to write. While acknowledgingthat the classroom focus on specific topics mightinfluence the content or choice of text type and hencethe grammatical structure of the collected texts, thecondition of instruction to teachers was that they shouldcollect samples of ‘undirected’ or ‘free’ writing. The aimwas to ensure that the sample would tap into children’srelatively unconstrained expression and provide evidenceof personally preferred word choices, hypothesizing thatthis would throw light on the personal lives, skills andinterests of the children involved.The following demographic data is from the 3776samples included in the analysis. The figures in Table 1refer to the number of useable texts collected, followedby the total word count represented by these texts, sothat 1879 texts were collected from boys comprising73,430 words, and 1897 texts from girls comprising86,808 words. Variations from the totals are indicated.Socio-economic status (SES) was not determineddirectly but on the basis of the location of the schooland its SES classification within the relevant educationdepartment procedures. All cohort factors, such aslanguage and cultural background, were determinedby teachers according to school records reported todepartments of education.It wchil as essendin s ren’s a tial to tuchutheapboth a way ntic w intoall y what as to u r itingis coounncodif fe g wr ite mmon verrstorentiatio and whatns exist.
GenderMale1879 (73,430)Female1897 (86,808)School yearFirst year1891 (38,733)Second year951 (48,798)Third year934 (72,702)School setting (SES) NB** n 3771Low SES1450 (62,151)Mid SES698 (25,836)High SES1623 (72,136)Indigenous NB** n 3765Indigenous63 (902)Non-indigenous3702 (157,483)Indigenous 1.67% of allLanguageEnglish speaking background (ESB)2466 (97,616)Non-English speaking background (Non-ESB)1310 (62,621)Non-ESB 34.69% of allLocationUrban3321 (144,274)Urban boys1624 (66,019)Rural455 (15,964)Urban girls1697 (78,255)Rural boys255 (7,411)Rural girls200 (8,553)Table 1: Demographic dataThe collected samples were copied and student codes were attached to each sample along with demographic datacompleted by the class teacher. Only complete data sets for each child were retained for analysis. This processproduced a total of 3776 texts distributed as presented in Table 1. The total sample was then subjected to wordcount and differentiated analysis according to the cohorts in the sample. Proper nouns and brand names were deletedfrom the word count.7
Research resultsWhat’s common among early writers?Generation changeTDhe most striking and general observation from thedata is the high proportion of commonality amongearly writers. Regardless of their location, gender,ethnicity, or socio-economic differences Australianchildren write with a large common vocabulary, theywrite words their peers will understand and thereforethey represent a ‘discourse’ community, or a communityof communication.The imaginative, descriptive and declarative worlds thesechildren deploy in what they write indicates a sharedenculturation, a common world of Australian childhood,which suggests that despite other differences Australia’syoung writers inhabit an overlapping world of experiencethat they display in their writing. This shared vocabularyis evident at two cut-off levels: the top 20 and the top 50words. It is only beyond these thresholds that indicatorsof difference begin to emerge. Differences of genderand probable differences in socio-cultural experience, aswell as the personal imaginative and creative capabilitiesof individual children, become more apparent when thetop 100, 200 and 300 words are compared. This suggeststhat the personal subjectivity of individual children isdisplayed and diverges from the shared community ofexpression once the essential core of vocabulary permitsmeaningful differences to emerge.A significant point of note is that on some occasionswhen a verb appears in both its past and presenttense forms, the past tense verb appears higher in thefrequency order than its paired present tense verb. As52% of the text types written by all students in thestudy were recounts this prevalence of past tense formsreflects the dominant grammatical structure of recounttexts.Other features at this broad level are children’s frequentuse of the apostrophe to signal word contractions. Inthe top 300 words used by all children the contractions didn’t , it’s , don’t , I’m , couldn’t and that’s are used, perhaps showing how children’s orallanguage articulates into their writing. An apostropheindicating possession becomes apparent in children’suse of cousin’s , a feature that is particularly prevalentin the writing samples collected from children of nonEnglish speaking backgrounds.8espite differences in design and size the OxfordWordlist, at this aggregated level, can be usefullycompared to the last known Australian study of wordsin children’s writing, the Salisbury Word List. Thiscomparison reveals interesting changes over time.The Salisbury Word List was compiled in Adelaide, SouthAustralia on research conducted during 1978–79 andrecords the 2000 words most frequently encountered inchildren’s writing, based on 150 text samples collectedfor each year level between years 3 and 7 (EducationDepartment of South Australia, 1984). As such thesample is considerably smaller and more restrictedthan the data in the Oxford Wordlist, and also differs inits spread over a different span of school years. The30 years of difference are significant generationally.During the period from 1978 to now writing itself hasalso undergone profound change as a result of theintroduction and diffusion of digital communicationsand other devices of information technologies that have‘technologised’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Snyder, 2002;Lankshear and Knobel, 2003) what counts as literacyand shaped some of the processes whereby writing isproduced.Table 2 shows those words included in the top 200 wordsfrom the Oxford Wordlist that do not appear in the top200 words from the Salisbury Word List. It is interesting toobserve that although there is 72.5% agreement acrossthe two lists 55 words differ. For ease of reference thewords are listed alphabetically.
twantedwaswatchedweekendwokewonwouldTable 2: Oxford Wordlist words from the top 200 that do not appear in the SalisburyWord List top 200 wordsThe most striking feature of the differences betweenthe two lists relates to the greater detail thatAustralian children today devote to events, activitiesand relationships than their counterparts of 1978–79.There is also the intriguing presence of a vocabularyof consumerism and a greater interest in food. Thewords bought , new , shop , shops , want , wanted , eat , ate , cake , dinner , fish , food do not appear among the top 200 SalisburyWord List words. Interest in food and consumer activitiescontinues to be a feature in the Oxford Wordlist withthe appearance of lunch , breakfast , chips , icecream , shopping and buy in the subsequent100 words.There is also a notable extension of the range of wordsused to describ
wordlist of basic sight vocabulary (1936). This was derived from a compilation of children’s oral vocabulary and words commonly found in young children’s reading materials. Although these data were collected in the 1920s and early 1930s and a comparison of the 220 words of this list with the top 220 words on the Oxford
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