Vocabulary Use Across Genres: Implications for Students With Complex Communication Needs

Abstract

The word lists generated can be used to inform vocabulary selection, organization, and instruction for students with complex communication needs who are beginning writers.

Core vocabulary in written personal narratives of school-age children

“…Clendon et al (2013) reported 58% overlap in the top 50 most frequently occurring words in their findings compared to the letter writing activities in the McGinnis and Beukelman study (1989). This is similar to the previous study (Clendon & Erickson, 2008), which reported 62% overlap in core words based on the top 50 words in their samples and the letter writing task of McGinnis and Beukelman.…”

“…Further, there was 56% overlap in the language arts writing task. Clendon et al (2013) reported that 20 out of 50 of the top core vocabulary words matched two other studies’ findings. The distribution of different word types or word choice varied across the studies.…”

“…There was 46% overlap in words (88/191) between the core word list of the current study and the 140 words reported in Clendon et al (2013). There were commonalities between the 50 most frequently occurring words in the current study and those identified in Clendon et al (2013).…”

“…The findings of Clendon and Erickson (2008) were substantiated by Clendon, Sturm, and Cali (2013), who analyzed vocabulary in written language samples from 124 children with typical development in kindergarten ( n = 65) and first grade ( n = 59). The investigators gathered 457 written samples (two to six samples per child) using self-selected topics on nine different writing tasks (labeling, story, narrative retell, plan, procedure, description, report, opinion, and explanation) with the most common being narrative retells (28%) and opinions (24%).…”

The Intersection of Culture and ICF-CY Personal and Environmental Factors for Alternative and Augmentative Communication

“…For example, a device or picture system should include items particular to the child's home life such as food, toys, and symbols representing holidays or regular events in the child's culture. Further, vocabulary selection in both English and the home language is important because the choice of words can hamper of hinder literacy and language development (Clendon, Sturm, & Cali, 2013). For example, morphological markers and structure words (e.g., auxiliaries, determiners, pronouns) have not traditionally been included on AAC devices, which can negatively affect language and literacy growth for beginning writers in English when their devices contain mostly nouns (Lund & Light, 2007;Sutton, Gallagher, Morford, & Shahnaz, 2000).…”