The oral language proficiency of students in early education is crucial as teachers draw on this as a resource when developing literacy. There is a need to better understand what this oral language resource consists of at school entry, particularly the diversity amongst children so as to address inequalities. This article reports a study on a key component of oral language, namely productive vocabulary. It profiles the oral language vocabulary in approximately 3.6 million words produced by a large sample of almost 800 children under the age of five. The results are reported in a productive vocabulary resource, structured as a list of 2767 vocabulary targets. This profile represents highly productive vocabulary presumably known by most children as well as more advanced vocabulary not part of every child’s oral language. The article demonstrates the pedagogical implications of this research in the context of the National Literacy Learning Progressions of the Australian National Curriculum.

学生在早期教育中的口语水平至关重要，因为教师在发展识字能力时会以此为资源。有必要在入学时更好地理解这种口头语言资源的组成，尤其是儿童之间的差异，以解决不平等现象。本文报告了一项关于口语的关键组成部分，即生产性词汇的研究。它以大约360万个五岁以下儿童的大量样本产生的大约360万个单词来描述口语词汇。结果以高效的词汇资源进行报告，该资源以2767个词汇目标的列表的形式构成。此配置文件代表了大多数孩子大概都知道的高生产率词汇表，以及不是每个孩子的口头语言一部分的更高级的词汇表。