A Basic Vocabulary for Beginning Reading

The authors report a student comparing the 306 words on the Basic Vocabulary for Beginning Reading with their occurrences in first- and/or second-grade reading materials in ten basic series currently in use. All 306 words were found in at least one of the series, and nearly 90 percent of the words occur in over half of the series. Even though the basic vocabulary was derived from sources other than basal readers (a computer-aided analysis of printed English and a study of the spontaneous vocabulary of young children), it is apparent that the majority of the words are common to a number of basic-reading series. More than one hundred twenty-five word lists have been constructed in the past seventy years—for a number of purposes. Most have been compiled on the basis of some type of word frequency (Gates, 1926; Fry, 1957), but others were developed on the basis of grapheme-phoneme correspondence (Bloomfield, 1961), children's writing (Rinsland, 1945), indispensability (Davis, 1967), and even comic book inclusion (Hill, 1943). Most have been derived from the vocabularies of basal reading materials. A list published by Dolch (1936) has received the widest popularity in recent decades. His list has been criticized recently because, having been drawn from studies completed in the 1920's, nearly one-third of the words therein are not among the most frequently occurring words in recent printed