WORDS, WORDS EVERYWHERE According to the National Reading Panel, a group of leading educators and scientists, vocabulary is one of the five foundational skills that students need to master in order to be fluent, confident readers. Thanks to technological advancements, experts now have the tools to pinpoint which words appear most frequently in school texts and are therefore the most critical for students to know if they are to be successful readers. GETTING TO THE CORE Research shows that a relatively small number of words make up the bulk of written English. Leading literacy experts Elfrieda Hiebert, Amanda Goodwin, and Gina Cervetti examined more than 10,000 digitized texts written for students across grade levels and content areas. Their analysis identified a “core vocabulary” that accounts for more than 90% of the words in school materials (Hiebert, Goodwin, & Cervetti, 2018). These words “represent ideas that are central to the themes and content of texts, usually share root words with additional words, and are often versatile in their meaning and function” (Hiebert, under review, p. 3). Knowing 90% of the words in a given text is considered the threshold for meaningful reading (Clay, 1985; Clay, 1991; Stahl, Heubach, & Holcomb, 2005). Such proficiency allows a reader to get the main idea of a passage and correctly decipher the meaning of unknown words, which in turn further expands their vocabulary. The core vocabulary identified through this research consists of more than 11,000 words, an unrealistic number for classroom instruction. However, research on morphological awareness suggests these words do not have to be individually taught. In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function. Words may consist of one morpheme, such as play , or multiple morphemes, such as playful . Morphologically related words are grouped together in our internal lexicon, leading some experts to suggest teaching vocabulary as members of morphological word families (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Their argument: If students know one member of a word family, such as the root word, they will likely be able to figure out the meanings of its family members. Research shows that proficient readers use root words to decipher unknown words (Carlisle, 2010), and that students lacking this word-sleuthing skill can learn it (Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). Consequently, Hiebert and her colleagues grouped the core vocabulary into 2,500 morphological word families, each including a root word, its inflected endings, and any derivational family members, with each family consisting of about five words on average.
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