Recognizing Words, the Three-Cueing System, and Identifying Words

Now, first of all, knowledge in your head.

When you read, you have both visual and non-visual information available to you.

The visual information, of course, is the words on the page.

And the non-visual information is the knowledge in your head.

Now, you may not realize it, but when you read it, the non-visual information is just as important as the visual information.

And this non-visual information includes three kinds of knowledge.

First, declarative knowledge.

And this is the knowledge, your knowledge of facts and concepts and their interrelationships.

The second is lexical knowledge.

This is your knowledge stored in your head of words, your internal dictionary, or your vocabulary.

Now lexical knowledge impacts learning to read and reading achievement.

Children learn between 3,000 and 4,000 words a year.

And by the end of elementary school, they know approximately 25,000 words.

And by the end of high school, they know approximately 50,000 to 80,000 words.

And these are estimates.

The numbers vary.

Some estimate that educated monolingual speakers know about 60,000 words.

Well, others estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows only about 42,000 lemmas.

And I had to look that one up too.

A lemma is a basic word form, as you might see it in a dictionary, that's used to represent all other forms.

For example, run is the lemma, and it includes runs, running, ran.

So now you can add another lemma to your lexicon.

And of course, there's different levels of knowing.

Can you define it? Can you use it? Do you recognize it? Do you understand it in a sentence? But the point here is that we've got a whole bunch of lemmas in our head.

And these are used to help us recognize the words on the page and create meaning with print as we're reading.