Summary: This book is the result of a study completed in 1995. It is aimed at analyzing Cuban schoolchildren’s vocabulary and how they use words, especially content words —nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs—, while studying other classes of words as well as phrases and compound lexies in children’s vocabulary. The sample consisted of 700,000 words selected from 7,000 (oral and written) compositions on different topics, written by second to sixth grade male and female students from urban and rural areas in ten Cuban provinces. All words in these texts were functionally coded, and spelling mistakes were marked using a special code for future didactic work. After coding compositions, these were processed with a computer system designed by the Centre for Applied Linguistics (VEC Computer System).The system organized all the information obtained. The vocabulary was arranged in alphabetical order. Each word was classified according to grammatical categories and frequency usage by grade and province. In addition, we determined the number of words by grade, area and gender, as wells as the averages of words based on the number of informants, both in oral and written compositions. We also determined the hundred most commonly used words in each grade and the ten most commonly used words by each type of word, as well as sentences and phrases present in the compositions. The computer system also made an inventory of spelling errors made by Cuban elementary students. This work produced other scientific results, i.e., four monographs on grammatical categories, two spelling methodologies and four dictionaries. This work received a prize awarded by the Academy of Sciences of Cuba in 1997. Ten scientific articles on this study have been published in journals and proceedings of national and international conferences, with a significant impact on linguists, teachers and professors. This work has been registered in the CENDA (National Copyright Centre).
Director: Eloína Miyares Bermúdez
General Coordinator: Julio Vitelio Ruiz Hernández
Other authors: Nancy Álamo Suárez, Celia Pérez Marqués, Leonel Ruiz Miyares y Katia González Heredia