So I’m working on a new vocabulary diagnostic and I want to model the process as well as the actual template…
- There’s an outline of what I started on here.
- And the initial results from the profiling software here.
The next thing is to come up with a bank of words that I can use in my vocabulary assessment.
It’s a bit rough and ready, but I’m going to make some assumptions:
- It’s ok for me to reduce and simply the Vocabulary Progression in the Reading Strand to three categories.
- These three categories are: Everyday words, Academic words, and Technical words.
- And these three categories line up more or less with Steps 3, 4/5, and 6 in the Vocabulary progression.
- I can tweak my own word lists to make words fit where I want, if I don’t agree with the software’s judgement.
Here’s a small bank of words chosen from the various lists, the rough criteria I used to choose them. I could have made these lists longer or shorter depending on my needs.
I’ll make my selection from these for assessment items in my vocabulary assessment – probably I’ll choose about 5 to 10 words from each list to make a short vocabulary assessment.
Everyday words
Choose words that are part of our everyday English. This may still include some less common words. Roughly equates to step 3 in the Vocabulary Progression in the Reading Strand.
- arrange
- argue
- audience
- check
- complain
- connect
- correct
- false
- guess
- guide
- hesitate
- improve
- list
- message
- pattern
- search
- sentence
- shop
- spell
Academic Words
Choose academic words or words that are part of the language of teaching and instruction. For example, this could include words from the Academic Word List (AWL), words relating to Bloom’s taxonomy, and other language used in an academic context or for task instructions. Roughly equates to step 4/5 in the Vocabulary Progression in the Reading Strand.
- abstract
- achieve
- analogy
- analyse
- appropriate
- approximate
- area
- aspect
- assess
- bias
- capacity
- category
- coherent
- contradict
- correspond
- combine
- compose
- discuss
- demonstrate
- derive
- edit
- establish
- equip
- evaluate
- factor
- formula
- grammar
- generate
- hypothesis
- identify
- ideology
- instruct
- integrate
- justify
- medium
- multiply
- perceive
- phenomenon
- research
- revise
- scenario
- sector
- significant
- subordinate
- valid
- whereas
Specialised or technical words
Choose specialised or technical words and terms. For example, this could include trades-related vocabulary, terminology relating to a specific and narrow area of study, or words that would fall outside of the 2600 words covered by the first two thousand high frequency word lists (1K and 2K word lists) plus the AWL (off-list).
Many of the words below relate to the “trade” of literacy, which was the focus on the text I used. But it could have been horticulture or hairdressing.
- abbreviations
- accent
- acronym
- adjective
- adverbs
- affixes
- articulate
- assertion
- bilingual
- chronological
- cognitive
- cohesion
- collocation
- curriculum
- dialogue
- ellipsis
- homonyms
- intonation
- metacognition
- onset
- phoneme
- preposition
- prosodic
- pronoun
- pronunciation
- rime
- schema
- suffix
- syntax
Finally, just for fun, I pasted the same 30,000 words of text into this website and generated the word cloud that you see at the top of this article.
