{"id":850,"date":"2018-03-21T14:54:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-21T14:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/?p=850"},"modified":"2019-05-13T11:24:13","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T11:24:13","slug":"many-decodable-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/many-decodable-words\/","title":{"rendered":"No Shortage of Decodable Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We recently made available online a free beta version of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/decodability-analysis-tool\/\">decodability analysis tool<\/a>\u00a0that we use to guide us in editing our manuscripts.\u00a0 Yesterday, we made some adjustments to the higher <a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/phonics-levels\/\">phonics levels of our decodable books<\/a>\u00a0and this meant an update to the tool.\u00a0 As I generated a new lookup table* based on the adjusted contents of the upper levels, I was noticing that there is <strong>no shortage of fully decodable words even at level 1<\/strong> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/teaching-reading-emergent-reader-1\/\">CVC and VC; also CCVC and CVCC<\/a> where each consonant contributes a sound, so no digraphs).<\/p>\n<p>This is not news to anyone who teaches reading and spelling using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/phonics\/\">phonics<\/a>, but I thought it might be interesting to share the distribution of words over the levels.\u00a0 I should point out that this count is <em>not exhaustive<\/em>. I\u2019m not saying, for example, that there are exactly 899 TAP level 1 decodable words in English but rather that our list currently contains that many.\u00a0 That being said, 899 is a lot!<\/p>\n<h2>Number of Decodable Words per Level<\/h2>\n<p>As of version 1.1 of the tool, the number of words in the decodability tool\u2019s lookup table in each level is as follows (with a few example words):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Level 1: 899 ( <em>at, flip, pill<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Level 2: 832 (<em> thin, sick, song<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Level 3: 4108 ( <em>date, itself, impute<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Level 4: 4300 ( <em>swamped, children, softball<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Level 5: 2668 ( <em>real, knead, arrow<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Level 6: 8977 ( <em>felines, biomass, babble<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Level 7: 2078 ( <em>judgeships, recent, saucer<\/em> )<\/li>\n<li>Morph Level: 722 ( <em>caution, vision<\/em> )<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Or if you\u2019d prefer a running tally, it looks like this<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Level 1: 899<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 2: 1,731<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 3: 5,839<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 4: 10,139<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 5: 12,807<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 6: 21,784<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 7: 23,862<\/li>\n<li>+ Level M: 24,584<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Percentage of the 10,000 Most Frequent Words<\/h2>\n<p>Just for fun, here\u2019s the percentage at each level of the <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/first20hours\/google-10000-english\/blob\/master\/google-10000-english-usa-no-swears-short.txt\">10,000 most frequent English-language words (excluding swear words \ud83d\ude41 )<\/a> used on the Internet according to Google circa 2016 and in parentheses the percentage of the 1000 most frequent of those:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Level 1: 4.5% ( 9.5% )<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 2: 6.8% ( 13.3% )<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 3: 14.5% ( 22.6% )<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 4: 21% ( 30.3% )<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 5: 26.3% ( 36.4% )<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 6: 41.7% ( 55.5% )<\/li>\n<li>+ Level 7: 46% ( 60.2%)<\/li>\n<li>+ Level M: 48% ( 61.5% )<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p class=\"p1\">OK, admittedly that&#8217;s a lot of <strong>numbers<\/strong> for a post about decodable <strong>words<\/strong>.\u00a0 The take home here is that the English lexicon of decodable words is sizeable and rich.\u00a0 By level 3 (where we allow the split digraph known as &#8220;silent e&#8221;), we see that learners have decodable access to fully a quarter of the 1,000 most frequent words and nearly 6,000 words if we let ourselves use &#8220;fancier&#8221; words like\u00a0<em>scrappy<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">We take advantage of that rich lexicon to create interesting, age-appropriate digital\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/\">phonics readers for teenagers and adults<\/a>.\u00a0 Curious? The TAP Library iPad app is free to download and samples of all our phonics books are included. <a href=\"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/app\/teen-adult-phonics-library\/id1189152100?mt=8\">Click\/tap here to go to the app page in the App Store<\/a>. (BTW, it&#8217;s crazy, but the link doesn&#8217;t work if you&#8217;re reading this on an iPhone, because the app is iPad only.)<\/p>\n<h2>Lists of Decodable Words<\/h2>\n<p>This post was really just to whet your appetite for decodable words.\u00a0 It&#8217;s only natural to want to see these words and that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ll focus on in my next few posts: a list of decodable words at each of the low TAP phonics levels starting with this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/list-decodable-words-level-1\/\">list of level 1 decodable words<\/a>.\u00a0 More than just a list, however, I want to give people tools for exploring and mining these rich, fully decodable sets of words.<\/p>\n<p>*I wrote a blog post announcing the availability of this tool that has more details on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/decodability-tool-announcement\/\">how the decodability analysis tool works<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We recently made available online a free beta version of the decodability analysis tool\u00a0that we use to guide us in&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":852,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[170,224],"tags":[597,598,444,603,441,4,602,601,440,439,600,599],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":860,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850\/revisions\/860"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.focusontap.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}