Vocabulary development begins when a parent responds to the sounds a baby
makes. A child responds immediately to the environment around him/her, and
the parent responses contribute to the development of a child�s listening
vocabulary. Children will imitate the language they hear, whether it
is �baby talk� or regional dialect. From this beginning, a child begins to
develop a rich vocabulary.
Books and being read to are also part of a child�s developing vocabulary.
Through listening to stories being read aloud, children begin to get
a �sense of story.� They begin to hear words like characters, setting,
problem, and dialogue, and add these terms to their ever-growing internal
dictionary.
So it is very natural that parents are their child�s first vocabulary
teacher. The first words that children listen to are heard from their
parents. As they learn to speak, parents respond. Parents continue by
reading and then listening to children read.
Some Statistics
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute indicates that �
By age 4 a person probably knows 5,600 words
By age 5 a person probably knows 9,600 words
By age 6 a person probably knows 14,700 words
By age 7 a person probably knows 21,200 words
By age 8 a person probably knows 26,300 words
By age 9 a person probably knows 29,300 words
By age 10 a person probably knows 34,300 words
By age 20 a college sophomore probably knows 120,000 words
The Importance of Vocabulary in the Reading Process
According to the National Institute For Literacy, Partnership for Reading,
vocabulary is an important part of both the decoding and the comprehension
that is necessary for learning to read. At the earliest stages of literacy,
children use the language they have heard and spoken to make sense out of
the print they will read. Children read words they have heard and spoken,
that are part of their oral vocabulary, more easily than words they are not
familiar with.
As reading difficulty increases, children need to know the meaning of most
of the words they read. Children need to know the meanings of new words they
have not heard before.
Other research studies have concluded:
Children who enter school with limited vocabulary knowledge continue to
encounter a gap in vocabulary as they continue in school.
The number of words children learn varies between 2 and 8 words per day and
750 to 3,000 words a year.
A great deal of vocabulary can be learned from just reading. Even �children
who read just ten minutes a day outside of school experience substantially
higher rates of vocabulary growth between second and fifth grade than
children who do little reading.� (Nagy & Anderson)
