Finally, I have been influenced by the consistent finding in the oral reading miscue literature that when overall error rates reach 5 percent of running words (tokens), that "contextual" errors (those that make sense in context) virtually disappear. This finding is particularly significant in view of Cunningham and Stanovich's (1997) recently reported finding that vocabulary as assessed in grade 1 predicts more than 30 percent of grade 11 reading comprehension, much more than reading mechanics as assessed in grade 1 do. Morrison, Williams, and Massetti (1998) have since replicated this finding. I was further influenced by the finding of my doctoral student, Maria Cantalini (1987), that school instruction in kindergarten and grade 1 apparently had no impact on vocabulary development as assessed by the Peabody vocabulary test. Disadvantaged homes provide little support for vocabulary growth, as recently documented by Hart and Risley (1995). He suggested that the difference was that all the knowledge that is needed for math achievement is taught in school, whereas the vocabulary growth needed for successful reading comprehension is essentially left to the home. Becker argued that this was a matter of experience rather than general intelligence by observing that while his DISTAR students' reading comprehension fell relative to more advantaged students by grade 4, their mathematics performance remained high. I had been particularly influenced by Wesley Becker's famous Harvard Educational Review article (1977) noting that the impact of early DISTAR success with decoding was muted for reading comprehension in later elementary grades by vocabulary limitations. (Jeanne mentioned to me several times her disappointment that The Reading Crisis was not more widely discussed.) In this book, Chall and her colleagues traced the relative decline in reading achievements experienced by working-class children who had become competent readers by third grade but whose vocabulary limitations increasingly had a negative effect on their reading comprehension as they advanced to seventh grade.
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Jeanne had come to this conclusion through her work on the stages of reading development (Chall, 1983/1996), her work on textbook difficulty (Chall and Conard, 1991), and especially through the findings of her joint research project with Catherine Snow on families and literacy (Chall, Snow, et al., 1982), as summarized in The Reading Crisis (Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin, 1990).
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Both of us had come to the conclusion that vocabulary growth was inadequately addressed in current educational curricula, especially in the elementary and preschool years and that more teacher-centered and planned curricula were needed, just as had been the case with phonics. During the past 10 years, Jeanne Chall encouraged me to focus on the study of vocabulary and how vocabulary growth might be encouraged.