The Growth of Vocabulary among University Students with Some Consideration of Methods of Fostering It

A number of questions arise whenever there is consideration of the matter of attain ment of vocabulary on the part of students, including college students. Do they show ade quate or significant improvement in under standing the meaning and correct use of words during their studentship? Do they learn the technical terms peculiar to the subjects they have studied? Do they have greater facility in the use of common or nontechnical words after a period of schooling than they had before? This study was undertaken in an attempt to find the answers to these questions and, incidentally, to discover whether certain types of procedure with selected groups on the col lege level would result in gains in any way commensurate with the effort involved in operating the procedures. Several studies have been made in the field of vocabulary. Some have been made in lim ited portions of the field, such as the deter mination of words necessary in the mastery of content, or with a view to determining the proper vocabulary content in the writing of new textbooks. Some have studied mastery alone, while others have tried to discover the amount of retention as well. Some of the earlier studies were made in connection with the building of vocabulary tests, others with the purpose of building word tests appropriate to definite groups such as grades, subjects, and so forth, and yet others for the discovery of the actual working vocabularies of such groups. A distinction sometimes has been made between quantitative and qualitative vocabularies, the one referring to mere num bers of words, the other to the type of word in terms of its fundamental nature and appro priateness to the situation in which it is used. In the matter of quantitative vocabularies, the findings of different investigators have been very diverse. For instance, one group1 of investigators found the range of words for two-year-olds to be from 200 to 1000, while another group found it to be from 69 to 677. Gerlach (18) reports the average vocabulary at five years to be 6837 words. English labor ers have been reported2 as able to carry on a conversation with a vocabulary of only 100 words. Baird (4) counted 650 words among tourists. This of course could not be a very adequate test, even of the oral or speaking vocabulary, because of the short period of observation and the relatively few topics to come up spontaneously for discussion out of the many with which at least certain ones of the tourists would be familiar. A New York business paper3 claims that a man in business dealings needs 3500 words. It would appear to be contingent upon the kind of business. In some of the earlier studies clear distinc tions were not made between the various types of vocabulary such as oral or speaking, writ ing, reading, and understanding; nor between the results obtained by different types of tests such as recognition, recall, and so forth. In order to find the number of words known, various devices or methods have been used. With very young children ordinarily a careful record is kept of the words actually used in a given time. For older children or adults, the dictionary method is often used. Terman (46) used this method in determin ing the words for his test. He made use of the Laird and Lee Vest Pocket Dictionary containing about 18,000 words. To make his list of 100 common words, he took the last word in every sixth column. This was sup posed to give a representative list of common words. Following this lead, other investi gators used this method with slight variations, as will be noted later. Difficult or unfamiliar * This article is a condensation of a Doctor's dissertation (1936) by the author, a complete copy of which is on file in the office of Dr. D. A. Worcester, Chairman of the Depart ment of Educational Psychology and Measurements, at the University of Nebraska. Anyone interested in examining the data in detail may consult the manuscript or write to the author. 1 Reported but not cited by Sister Irmina (43). 2 Reported but not cited by Sister Irmina (43). 3 Ibid.