vocabulary and assessments

Recently, I listened to a podcast that talked about the work of Beverley Jennings, a PhD candidate from England whose research focuses on vocabulary and high stakes testing. In her research, she is working to uncover the best vocabulary words upper grade students should be exposed to in order to pass a standardized English language exam. 

The podcast was eye opening and affirming all at the same time.  Eye opening because I'm surprised to hear that other countries struggle with the same educational dilemmas that we do in the United States.  Affirming because it gave voice to something I've noticed about many of the common assessments we give - the vocabulary our students encounter in the daily material we teach is not the same as the vocabulary they encounter on many English Language Arts assessments.

Jenning's research sought to answer two questions:

1.  What type of vocabulary is typical of the exam tests?
2. In what types of reading material is the vocabulary that typifies the exam texts most likely to be found? 

She used a method called corpus linguistics to analyze 59 released versions of texts, both fiction and non-fiction, that make up the texts used on the exam. Interestingly, a requirement of the texts is that they include texts from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  Without going into all of the details (I am a nerd, after all!), Jennings found that the majority of the vocabulary found in these exam texts were "low frequency" words - words that readers would have difficulty encountering enough to develop "stickiness" or embed into their everyday language.

Which brings me to a question that I'll dig into in another blog post - should teachers be exposing students to more classic texts, or should assessments more closely align with the students' current literacy realities? What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Jennings, B., Powell, D., Jaworska, S. & Joseph, H. (2024). A Corpus Study of English Language Exam Texts: Vocabulary Difficulty and the Impact on Students' Wider Reading (or Should Students be Reading More Texts by Dead White Men?). Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 67, 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1331