Reading test and related information

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reading test from 1938 (Burt)

Ladybird keyword list
calculating magic quotients
vocabulary comprehension and count test
how many words do you know?
bibliography
endnotes

reading test from 1938

A reading test like this, while useful, will only give you an approximate guide. Language usage changes over time and among sub-cultures. You will not use all the words that you know in everyday speech. Different words will be used in conversation. The objective, as stated in Teaching reading using phonetics, is to get the person to the stage where they can read on their own while investigating and expanding their vocabulary.

The early words learned will have a disproportionate number of non-phonetic words, as they have been in language for a very long time. This is one of the factors that has motivated teachers to use look-say, though it is not a good excuse. It is for reasons like this that you will find word lists, such as those in Teaching reading using phonetics, useful in the early stages of teaching a child to read.

Much teaching ‘theory’ is far too eager to make the child ‘succeed’, as if learning to puzzle out words is not fun on its own and in some fear that the child has to be tempted into finding learning to read interesting or useful.

Doubtless, by the time the child comes to reading, it will usually be interested in holding conversations and can be told that interesting conversations of all types may be found in books. Overplay of ‘how very important’ it is to read to your child can become a passive way of making it less necessary for the child to have to read itself. Further, a great deal of what is read to children is fictional rhubarb. There is plenty enough in the real world to get a child’s interest without filling their head with invisible and scary nonsense.

The Ladybird series is structured to appease the look-say lobby by suggesting that early words are taught by the Chinese character method. Unless you are caught up in the fashion, there is no reason that you should give it more than passing awareness. Many of the reading schemes prior to the Chinese fashion are, instead, structured to open up with phonetically more regular words. Of course, any child, with repetition and experience, will start to recognise Chinese characters like who, thus incorporating their own self-built collection of look-say awkward words.

According to Ladybird support literature, the average adult knows approximately 20,000 words. An advanced dictionary will contain at least twenty times that number of words, maybe half a million before considering derivations. The diagram below represents the 20,000 words in an average vocabulary. The frequency of use of the words is indicated by area. As you will see, about twelve words make up about twenty-five percent of the words used in a child’s vocabulary, while about a hundred words make up about half their vocabulary. The Ladybird reading scheme (and the words used) are derived from a large number of different research findings into children’s language. Do not be reticent to add your own words to the child’s growing vocabulary. While this list is structured in detail for the Ladybird series, naturally the producers of readers going back a hundred years were not unaware of children’s vocabulary and tended to improve ‘their’ readers during experience and practice.

ladybird keyword list

Ladybird keyword list, by frequency of use © Ladybird Books Ltd 1969

Below is the same list made clearer to read.

calculating magic quotients

There are two major ways to calculate human abilities. Both methods are referred to at times as I.Q., reading quotient, etc. When dealing with children, it is often thought useful to compare them with their age peers in the culture. To this end, a reading age assessment is made by comparing the child’s present performance to the assessed average age of a child who meets that performance standard, and then perhaps generate a quotient to make it look ‘scientific’. This can be done by the following calculation.

Reading Test calculation

Reading age          x   100    =         Actual age

The second major method is to calculate the spread of abilities at a particular age and then assume those abilities fall ‘randomly’. Then, by varieties of jiggery-pokery, make sure they do fit such a distribution. If you care enough to start swimming in these murky waters, you may enjoy yourself by reference to Intelligence: misuse and abuse of statistics and to Is Intelligence Distributed Normally? By Cyril Burt, 1963.

Experience has shown that using the age quotient, a standard deviation of somewhere around fifteen points appears, if you care to make the assumptions inherent in the second method - no don’t worry about it, unless you really are up for the murky swim. You can teach a child to read perfectly well, without knowing anything much at all about these magical potions.

vocabulary comprehension and count test

The vocabulary comprehension and count test below is from the 1916 Terman-Binet I.Q. Test. You will get a rough idea of how many words you know by multiplying the number of correct definitions in either the left-hand or right-hand 50-item test by 360. Else, you can multiply the total score on both tests by 180.

As you will see, one or two of the words are not in very common use 90 years later.

Such a test is fairly easy to construct.

1. Select a dictionary.
2. Decide how many words you want on your list.
3. Write down how many pages of words there are in the dictionary.
4. Work out how many word definitions there are on a page. (Many words will have subsidiary words. For example, patriot may include the word ‘patriotism’, whereas another dictionary may place this as two words.) It depends on how deep you want to go and how you intend to count as to how much you concern yourself with such problems. Here, I will assume attending only to prime entries.
   4 a. This is usually done by counting the number of words on ten, or twenty, pages at random, and then dividing the number by the number of pages that you sample. I will assume that your average number of words per page came to 27. (Some computer dictionaries will do a full count on a dictionary for you.)
5. Divide the number of pages by the numbers of words that you want in your list. The more words that you have on your list, the greater the reliability will be for that particular dictionary, but the longer your list the more boring it will be to give or receive.
6. Assuming that your dictionary has 1,200 pages and you want a list of 40 words, then divide 1,200 by 40, which gives you 30.
7. Next decide how you will select the pages and the words. This can be done with random number tables, or with dice, or just by taking every 30th page. Likewise, you can select which word on the page to choose. For instance, the first word, the seventh word, or in order as you go through the dictionary , the first, the second, the third word, and so on. Note: here you may have to have a special rule for the last page for each of the 26 letters, where part or all of the page may be blank.
8. You now have your 40 words. Now you may assemble them in alphabetical or in random order, or in approximate order of difficulty as in the above tests; and that is your basic test.
9. To work out how many words each word in your list represents, you have 1,200 pages times an average of 27 words, that is 32,400 words. You then divide this number by the number of words in your test list, which is 40. Therefore, each of your test words represents 810 words in your dictionary.

how many words do you know?

You will see from the vocabulary test above that it has come from a (small) dictionary with approximately 18,000 words [180 x 100 words]. The table on p.310 of Terman suggests that the average sixteen year old, at the time the test was standardised, was able to score about 65 correct definitions, that is about 12,000 words. This seems more realistic to me than the 20,000 words suggested by some sources.

If you have reached this far, remember that in any substantial dictionary a word may have subsumed variants. For instance, the word ‘wait’ may have words such as ‘waited’, ‘waiting’, ‘waits’, and thus counting the number of words a person knows depends on pre-assumed definitions.

In the days when such tests were regarded with more magical awe, sixteen years of age was rather arbitrarily taken as the age at when intellect stops developing. Naturally, any reasonably intelligent adult goes on learning new words for the rest of their lives.

Whether the average number of words known by a sixteen year old in 2007 is greater or less than in 1916, I haven’t checked in detail. In 1916, vocabulary and spelling were high in the priorities of any teacher within their dull classrooms. In those days, the school-leaving age was fourteen and often younger.

Now, with technology exploding in every direction with the associated vocabularies, with research access to the world widely available, my guess is that the modern citizen has approximately the same number of words at sixteen. There is an increasingly large proportion of the population going on to advanced education. Nevertheless, conversation, which in 1916 was a considerable part of normal life, has now been widely supplanted by passive visual media. In the modern world, education is more directed to teaching people how to find what they want, rather than merely memorising.

My guess is that the average vocabulary hasn’t, in fact, changed much over the intervening years. Thus the test is not entirely destroyed by the passing of time.

bibliography

• Reading with phonics, teacher’s edition by Julie Hay and Charles E. Wingo
  J.B. Lippincott Company, 1948 reprinted 1968, 0397432968
  amazon.com
  
  
• Keywords to literacy by J. McNally and W. Murray
  Schoolmaster Publishing Co. Ltd, 1962, 0900642343
  amazon.co.uk
  
  
• The standardisation of a graded reading test by P.E. Vernon
  University of London Press Ltd, 1938, reprinted 1962
  amazon.co.uk
  
  
• Teaching reading by W. Murray
  Ladybird Books Ltd, 1965, 0721402615
  amazon.co.uk
  
  
• Terman-Binet I.Q. Test materials, 1916
  
  
• McGuffeys’s first eclectic reader,
  John Wiley and Sons Inc., first printed 1879, 0471288896
  $9.95 [amazon.com] {advert} / amazon.co.uk
  
  
• The intelligence of school children by Lewis M. Terman,
  George G. Harrap and Co Ltd, 1921
  Note: pages 308 to 312 give some notes on the vocabulary test shown above.
  
  
• Green eggs and ham by Dr. Seuss
  Random House, 1960, 0394800168
  

  $8.89 [amazon.com] {advert} / amazon.co.uk

  [Green eggs and ham is one of 16 books in the Beginner books series of Dr Seuss books. Other Beginner titles include The cat in the hat, One fish two fish red fish blue fish, There’s a wocket in my pocket.]

end notes

1. The numbers in this column mean: the average age at which a person can read up to here - 4 years old (no words!), 5 years old etc. One extra word approximates to one-tenth of a year. If the child cannot read the word effectively, then you go on checking forward until it is obvious that they will not be able to tackle further words, adding one-tenth of a year for each word managed. You must not assist the child in any way to read the word.
   
   The test should not be applied more than every three to six months, in order that the child forgets the test. Any specific teaching of the test words in between times will invalidate the test. Naturally, if the child has, meanwhile, come across, learnt or become able to interpret the word, this will not invalidate the test.
   
   Remember, different people reach these levels art different times, depending upon their ability, experience and education.

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2810 words
prints as 8 A4 pages (on my printer and set-up)