How Many Words Do Students Need to Know?
Over the years, estimates of student vocabulary size have varied greatly, hindered in part by issues such as the types of vocabularies being considered (e.g., receptive/ productive or oral/print). Depending on how they approached such issues, early vocabulary researchers reported figures ranging from 2,500 to 26,000 words in the vocabularies of typical grade 1 students and from 19,000 to 200,000 words for college graduate students (Beck & McKeown, 1991). As researchers began to define more clearly what they meant by vocabulary size, the estimates became more precise. At the present time, there is considerable consensus among researchers that students add approximately 2,000 to 3,500 distinct words yearly to their reading vocabularies (Anderson & Nagy, 1992; Anglin, 1993; Beck & McKeown, 1991; White et al., 1990).