School Speak Word List

1. A variety of academic word lists were considered for this project. These included the Coxhead (2000) and Marzano (2004) Academic Word lists. Each list was removed from consideration for failing to meet the needs of students transitioning from a basic interpersonal vocabulary to an academic vocabulary.
   
   
2. An initial list of over 1500 words from the Oxford Picture Dictionary of Content Area Words (Kauffman and Apple, 2000) also was considered. This list consisted of "words drawn from the content areas of social studies, history, science, and math." However, after review by the project’s advisory board this list was rejected because after words that appeared in The First 4,000 Words list (Graves, Sales, and Ruda, 2007) were removed, many of the remaining words were deemed to be of little value in a school setting.
   
   
3. The final list of target words was derived from Biemiller’s list, Words Worth Teaching in Grades Three to Six (Biemiller, in press,). Biemiller identified a total of 2,579 words important to the school success of students this age. To eliminate redundancy across our two programs, the words used in The First 4,000 Words Project were removed from Biemiller's list, leaving 1,601 words. This action resulted in a list of words that are less frequent than the first 4,000 most frequent words, but still considered important to students’ success in school.

              Click here to see the final School Speak word list.

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