Home Michael My Talker AAC Language: Core Words:3-4 Yrs 100 Adult Starter GCV Dolce
Words: Mick Mum English Teachers Databases: LAM & PeRT Progress Monitor LLL Flashcards
note: this data is about 4 years old
Core Word Count
We counted the words in Michael's Wellington Square dictionary and found 145, but only 65 of them were core words from the 300 and 100 words lists that Professor Bruce Baker had given us, so Mum set about re-writing the text for the books to include more core words and Pritt-stuck the new text into the books.
The Fitzgerald colour-coding lets us see at a glance that the count of core words in the list above (pink, green and yellow words) has increased compared to the original text, but it still contains more nouns (orange words) than would occur in natural conversation (see core words list from a language sample speaking children).
We believe the larger than normal number of nouns (orange words) and fewer pronoun variations (yellow words) in reading books, especially for young children, is because the names of the characters, places and things in the story get repeated on each page. In daily speech a place, person or thing would be named once and then referred to as there, him, her, it... in subsequent mentionings.
Core Words Dictionary
We made Michael a 500-words Core Words icon sequence (file path) dictionary towards the end of 2003, and drafted a 1,100 Core Dictionary in January 2005, but haven't printed it yet as we've just been through one of those years when everything was up in the air regarding whether we were to trial another communication aid, and whether any teachers were to be trained in Pathfinder, and what provision and support should there be. We're not trying another device and training for Pathfinder is being discussed between school, SLT, PRI, Ace Oldham, LEA...
Anyway, the files are on Michael's memory stick at school so staff can proof-read and comment on it before we print it.
Michael is good at using his dictionaries. He just needs those around him to do their part in realising the vocabulary needs of the moment and give him a hand in constructing meaninful phrases.
More stories and dictionaries
Mum typed out an 1800 word story from the Pathfinder LLL Manual, 'The Bridge Story', because it was written to include all the important little words stored in the Bridge folder in LLL. A few steps were performed on the text in Microsoft Word to prepare it for making a dictionary that would contain one copy of each word from the story in it:
- Perform a word count to discern size of story in words
- Use Find and Replace to remove all punctuation marks
- Convert text to lowecase
- Place all words in a one-column table
- Sort Ascending
- Remove all duplicates
- Perform a word count to discern number of different words in story
- Proof read and manually reassign capital case to 'I' and names of people and places
This 1800 word story was found to have around 500 different words in it. Many of the words, although core, only appeared once or twice in the (very long) story, so there was likely to be little chance of enough repetition to enforce actual learning of the locations of the words on the communication aid. Back to the drawing board.
Shorter texts
The above steps, to extract one copy of each word for a dictionary could be performed on much shorter stories, song lyrics, rhymes, made-up texts, and real conversation phrases, where smaller groups of core words could be focused on and this would provide the necessary repetition, e.g. 'look right look left look right again...' 'everybody thought somebody would do it but nobody did...' 'anytime anyplace anywhere...' 'in over through off...' 'what?' 'when?' 'where?' 'why?' 'you didn't, did you?'