Beyond School

Contents:
1) Dry but necessary (and interesting, really) background to computer-assisted “corpus linguistics”;
2) Application of Vocab Profiler to a little “Scribe 2.0″ medieval satire I had fun writing way back when;
3) Tutorial on some uses of Vocab Profiler to aid in scaffolding classroom reading comprehension;
4) Caveats and Take-Aways

Dan Meyer just posted a refreshing little jeremiad against Wordle and Animoto, with which I largely agree - they’re fun, sure, but require all the mental and creative activity of slipping some coins into a Coke machine and then pulling the can from the tray.

Anyway, that post spurred me to share an old tool I’ve used since teaching ESL in Shanghai a few years ago.  It’s one of a muscular suite of tools made freely available at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s “Compleat Lexical Tutor” called VocabProfiler.

To appreciate what the VP does, it helps to have a bit of background in corpus linguistics, the computer-assisted analysis of word frequency in the English language.

OVERVIEW OF CORPUS LINGUISTICS FOR VOCABULARY TEACHING:

By scanning millions of words from a broad representative sample of English texts - newspapers, textbooks, novels, and more - and then counting the frequency of both words and word families (like Latinate words and their derivations), linguists could identify which words in the English language are necessary to know in order to comprehend an average adult text.

ESL research posits that for a text to be suitable for a reader (at the reader’s “instructional level”), that reader should know 95% of the words in the text. In other words, if the reader is unfamiliar with more than 1 out of 20 words in the text on average, comprehension breaks down, and the reader is cursed with a text at “frustration level.”

Corpus linguistics helps us figure out which words and word families are necessary to know to reach that golden 95% of lexical knowledge that enables reading comprehension. What it shows is that learning the 1,000 most frequent words and word families in the English language allows a reader to comprehend around 74% of words in an academic text (and the percentage is higher for  newspapers, fiction, and conversational English).

While 74% lexical comprehension is a powerful payoff for learning those first 1,000 words (the “1k list”), you’ll note that it still leaves us 21% short of the magic 95%.

Learning the second most frequent 1,000 words and word families, though (the “2k list”), covers an average of 5% more (in academic texts). So knowing the the first 2,000 most frequent word families in the language brings us up to 79% lexical familiarity with academic texts. That’s powerful and efficient vocab work, but it still leaves us 16% short, still doomed to frustration-level reading - “barking at text” without comprehending the meaning.

And here’s where things get interesting. Logically, you’d think learning the 2,001st-3,000th most frequent words would be the sensible thing to do after learning the first 2k, but that’s not true. You only gain a percentage point or two. (Think of the Long Tail applied to English vocabulary: we all use the top 2k, but after that, the hundreds of thousands of other words in the language flatten out.)  Instead, your next big vocab-learning investment should be in a group of 570 word families that, once learned, add another whopping 8.5% of lexical comprehension to academic texts.  This group is called the Academic Word List (AWL).

The AWL is that group of words that show up frequently across the entire range of academic disciplines - words like this list from a text of my own I just crunched: “accurate, achieve, conclude, conduct, create, deny, error, final, focus, ignorant, instance, labour, normal, plus, task, tradition.” [Update: An excellent set of online quizzes for all 570 of these AWL word families, arranged in sublists from easier to harder, can be found at this University of Victoria site.]

So let’s recap the math:

Lexical Coverage of Average Academic Text from Learning the 2,000 Most Frequent Word families + the 570 Academic Word List:

1k list ≈ 73.5%
+2k list ≈  4.6%
+AWL    ≈  8.5%
total comp:  86.6%

(Here’s a nice graphic (source) showing the coverage of those word/word families for conversational English, fiction, and newspapers, respectively:

Before moving on to the tool I promise to show you, let’s deal with the question: How do we know what words to teach to bridge the gap from 87% to 95%?

The short answer: we don’t (or I don’t, anyway).  One helpful approach is to focus on the specialized academic language specific to any discipline.  Words like metaphor, simile, paradox, hyberbole, and so forth, for example, are not on the AWL because they’re specialized literary vocabulary, so if you’re a literature teacher, you know the specialized literary words that are high-frequency to your content area.  Teachers in math, science, social studies, art, music, and so forth similarly know the high-frequency vocabulary of their disciplines.  Those specialized subject-area lists are an obvious first step to bridging that gap.  BUT HERE’S THE BEAUTY (cue segue music): you can use the vocabulary profiler to identify any words not in the 2k and AWL that are in your course readings, and pre-teach them to enable 95% comprehension of your specific class texts. (You can use it for much more, but one thing at a time.)

So let’s move on to the Vocabulary Profiler.

Let’s pretend that you are assigning my post “Adventures of Scribe 2.0” - a bit of satiric fiction I abandoned after that post in the second month of this space, when only Diane Cordell, Patrick Higgins, and Christopher Watson were reading me .

Here’s the text:

Monk Expelled for Creating “Devil’s Workshop”

29 December, Anno Domini 1527
Wittenberg, Saxony
The Catholic Press

Visionius Neocogitus, a 21-year-old neophyte in the hallowed Benedictine Monastery in Wittenberg, was expelled from the Order yesterday for disobeying the Abbot, dishonoring the time-honored traditions of the ancient Order, and “making pacts with the Devil.”

The young neophyte was charged by his Abbot, Father Orthodoxius Paleologus, with shirking his sacred duties in the scriptorium, malingering, and spreading heretical ideas.

“Young Neocogitus is not suited to holy work,” said Paleologus. “From the moment he entered the Brotherhood, he was a force of discord and disobedience. Not an hour passed without Neocogitus doing something to disrupt the solemn traditions of the Order. After much soul-searching, fasting, and praying over the problems caused by this wayward youth, the Holy Spirit finally spoke to me, and said, ‘For the good of the Order, Neocogitus must go’.”

A Promising Beginning

The trouble began on the first day the young neophyte was brought for training in the scriptorium, the vast chamber in which monks of the Order have been hand-copying the Holy Writ for the last 600 years.

According to Friar Heironymous Tuck, the monk charged with training young Neocogitus in the science of holy transcription, the neophyte was arrogant, sarcastic, and insubordinate within a minute of entering the hall.

“Neocogitus beheld the glorious sight of these dozens of God’s servants, backs bowed and heads down in pious, meditative labor, dutifully performing God’s work,” said Tuck. “And he had the audacity to snicker. I smelt a whiff of sulfur, and knew we had a heretic in our ranks.”

But Neocogitus mastered his spleen, said Tuck, and went on to prove himself an unusually able apprentice.

“There’s no denying the young man was uncommonly quick to learn,” Tuck continued. “All of the finer points of the book-copying arts–copying in neat script, in straight lines, spelling correctly, and above all, staying awake and alert–Neocogitus mastered within a day.”

Indeed, by the end of his first eight-hour duty, the young man had produced a flawless reproduction of the Book of Genesis–a task that took three times as long for far more experienced scribes.

More remarkable still, by the end of his first month as an apprentice scribe, Neocogitus achieved what had never been done before: he had produced an entire copy of the Bible–all 66 books, plus the Apocrypha.

“It was a miracle,” said Tuck. “It had never been done before. And it was perfect, flawless: I personally checked each and every line for errors–and there were none.”

Abbe Paleologus heard the news with joy. “It seemed a sign from heaven,” Paleologus said. “There were so many heathens living in the darkness, helpless to see the light without God’s word. Yet, because there were so many more heathens than there were monks to copy the Holy Writ–and because it normally took six months for a scribe to produce one correct copy–it seemed we would never be able to rescue all the heathens from their ignorance.”

“But this young monk, Neocogitus,” the Abbot continued, “seemed sent to improve our chances. I had heard that his conduct was often troublesome, irreverent, and lacking in humility. But at the time, I thought this was one more instance of God’s mysterious ways. This whelp would help us spread God’s word with godspeed.”

“Little did I know,” he concluded, “that this was not God’s work at all–but the Devil’s.”

The Devil’s Work

Neocogitus’ first Bible aroused curiosity throughout the monastery. The Order was abuzz with talk about its inerrancy, legibility, elegant script. Above all, however, the talk focused on this question: how had the young man produced it so fast? Was it really possible to produce an accurate copy of the entirety of the scripture in one short month?

To get to the bottom of this mystery, Father Paleologus summoned Neocogitus to his chambers for a private interview.

[WHAT is the secret to Neocogitus’ miraculous powers? LEARN THIS, and more, in the NEXT EPISODE! ON SALE AT BLOGSTANDS SOON!!!]

–There’s a lot of specialized vocabulary here from Medieval history, religious studies, and more, so you know your students won’t be familiar with much of it.  Solution: crunch it through the Vocabulary Profiler.  After copy/paste/submit, this is what you get on top of the screen: an overall breakdown of the percentages of words from the lexical bands relative to the entire text, as you see here (click this and all further images for larger view):

How is this helpful?  Several ways, primary among which is the simple breakdown it gives you of the percentage of words not in the high frequency bands. If that percentage is high, then maybe it’s simply not a text suitable for the readability level of your class’s age group. This is a common problem in high school, where content teachers untrained in literacy research go overboard by assigning college-level texts to students incapable of comprehending their lexical (and syntactic, but that’s a different beast) complexity.

Scrolling down that same screen, the next thing you see is a color-coded breakdown of where each word in the text falls in the word frequency range from corpus linguistics.  (Blue = 1k, Green = 2k, Yellow = AWL, Red = Lower-frequency “off-list” words) (click image for larger view):

While it ain’t as pretty as Wordle, it’s much more useful for teaching (and learning, as I’ll show later).  You can simply have students scan the red words themselves to look them up before reading, or you can prep the pre-teaching vocab lesson yourself.

“But wait a minute,” you say. “What if it’s a long text - say, a 20 page chapter from a novel?”  Good question, and VP helps you with the following breakdown as you scroll down the screen (click image for larger view):

–what you see in this “type list” (”types” are the individual words in the text) is an alphabetized list of each word, grouped in the four frequency bands, and followed by the number of appearances each word makes in the text.  This is key . In the above example, we can see that the words neophyte, monk, heretic, and abbot in the red “off-list” (low-frequency) range show up several times in this short text, and thus decide to give them more emphasis in pre-teaching the text’s vocabulary.  (If this were a longer text, this frequency count of off-list words would serve the same purpose.)  You’ll also note it gives you a handy list of the general purpose academic vocabulary from the AWL that will benefit all students across the curriculum.

TAKE-AWAYS, CAVEATS, and REQUEST FOR CAVILS:

What are some other take-aways from this little tutorial?

Students can use this tool to analyze (learn about) their own lexical sophistication. Have them drop their latest essay or story into the profiler, and let them see how many of their word choices are sophisticated enough to fall outside of the top 2000 words.  The colors won’t lie.

Teachers (and students) can create vocab quizzes on Quizlet (better than Mystudiyo, I’ve decided - check it out) or elsewhere using this to help them identify which words to prioritize in vocabulary study. If you don’t know any words in the blue list, by George you should. Ditto the green and yellow.  Beyond that, we’re talking less frequent, thus less crucial words to know by heart.

Corpus linguistics ain’t perfect. Some words - homonyms, for example, but also words with varying meanings depending on context - skew the results in the analysis. But that’s life for now.

Syntax is still important. Knowing vocab isn’t enough. Sentence structure and grammatical functions need attention too (duh - but you’d be amazed how many people think language learning is all about vocab).

Fancy SAT words are well-and-all, but many students don’t know many words in the 2k + AWL, and they’re more important. Teachers can help them fill the gaps in their knowledge of these words with the VP. “Utlilize” is less important (and to my demotic tastes, less elegant) than “use.”  English teachers take note.

This tool is especially helpful for online texts. Copy-paste novel chapters, textbook chapters, etc into the profiler, and your pre-reading activities are instantly enhanced and guided by literacy research.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor is great for making cloze exercises and all sorts of other things.

This post is way too long. Sorry. But it should be a spell more useful than Wordle.

What about you - anything to add?

References:

Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. New York: Cambridge University Press.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I’ve wanted to help this happen for the last five months. And I need your help to launch it with quality and good aim. Just a thoughtful comment consisting of a short list is all we ask.

First, a recap. Why re-write what was already obsessively written since May? So:

What would happen if we educators encouraged volunteer students to create a niche of learner edubloggers? That could be enlightening indeed.
– post from 6 May 2007

[Giving student presentations at education conferences] means less (next to nothing, I would guess) to students compared to their daily school experience, and their participation in the larger world generally. They should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners.
– post from 7 July 2007

[L]et the star student-writers with forward-thinking parents be the first members of the type of “LearnerVoices” [blog] Scott Schwister is envisioning. And make it pay off, for both the students and the edublogosphere, by inviting those young writers into our dialogue, and not only commenting on their blogs, but asking them to comment on ours. That’s a reality check worth inviting. . . . Because we need to get beyond this stage of adult-centered edutalk. It’s time to bring in the silent - and silenced - majority: our students.
– post from 8 July 2007

[W]e seem to be seeing a new milestone in the edublogosphere: the beginnings of democracy with the inclusion of our student Silent Majority. How freakin’ cool is that.
– post from 5 August 2007

The URL is bought, the WordPress is installed, and several student bloggers from different countries have agreed to contribute and serve as editors (feel free to pass an invitation along to any student edublogger you know to contact me here, by the way). We’re going to Skype this weekend to clarify the approach.

And that’s where you adult edubloggers can help. Since you’re the intended audience, it would be great if you could take a minute to look at this wonderfully tight list of categories from the aptly named A List Apart blog, and distill a list of the six categories you’d most like to read about in a collective student edublog.

Again, we’ll be laying the foundations this Saturday. You can help assure those foundations will be solid by leaving a thoughtful “list apart” of your own.

Comments beyond that list, of course, are welcome. If you were me, what other concerns would you have, what policies (if any) would you insist upon?

The target launch date is December 1. They’ll be reading you. I’m sure they hope you’ll be reading them too.
–

A special thanks to Scott Schwister and Scott McLeod here, by the way. His offer to support this idea back in August was somehow a tipping point for me.

(Apologies for the style. I’m overdue some sleep, but wanted to put the request out as soon as possible.)

–Image credit: “Megaphone Tank on a Barcode” by lyers on Flickr

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Last week, I mentioned reading Jeff Wasserman’s post about how schools teach bad writing (the 5-Paragraph Essay and other abominations). I mentioned how it made me “want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical.”

The more I thought about atomizing those Ning walls and welcoming the world of people who like to talk about reading, writing, and how schooliness creates lifelong non-readers and non-writers, the more attractive the idea became.

So whoever you are, if conversations such as the one below entice you to share your thoughts with my students about literacy in schools versus the literacy so many of us adults managed to grow into despite them (okay, maybe you were lucky and had good teachers, which would be interesting to hear about), then come on in. My students gave me permission to invite you.

Here’s just a taste from one forum on how practicing the organic essay form for five weeks improved (or didn’t) these students’ writing - I hope you don’t take it as self-congratulatory, because that’s not the point:

Reply by Shim Sep 17:

Well, when I first came into the classroom, I really didn’t know if I belonged in this class or not. After my first mock exam I realized that it was really different from what I expected, it was HARD. But after a couple of classes and more mock exams I guess I found my own way of writing and letting out my thoughts, unlike the schooly ways that education has locked us up in. So far I believe that I’ve started to write faster and think faster, as we practice more and more, and realize more and more. I’ve also found out that, rather thinking to the “educational” way that I’ve been living up with for the past 17 years, just letting out my ideas felt more better and more reasonable (which I guess is organic writing).

Reply by Clay Burell Sep 30:

Jeez, that was nice to read. Schools try, but for some reason, usually fail, to make students love reading great stuff and trying to write great stuff about their own responses. You give me hope that maybe I’m not failing.

Reply by Shim Oct 1:

Yeah, I mean I never knew that I was able to “ENJOY” literature, because of the ideas that schools all over the world put into students like me. Literature is HARD, “Do it this way that way”, “great interpretation, but WRONG”.

I really hope some of you will browse and add your thoughts to those of my students. They’re really interesting people.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently - like we adult edubloggers do - to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 - share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer - a waste of time, mostly - but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning - through - failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

–

*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school - and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I couldn’t resist grabbing this screenshot of the Answers Firefox add-on defining the word “grok” in this context: beneath OED lexicographer and “Dictionary Evangelist” Erin McKean’s TED talk on 21st C. lexicography, and above Graham, who rightly asked in one of two funny comments what the hell I was trying to say in one of the many embarrassing sentences I bang out on these pages.

So sue me. I get exuberant.

But cereal, folks: look at that picture: it even sources this bit of slang back to Heinlein’s originating coinage. When I was a kid, I had to walk through the snows of the school hallways ten miles uphill backwards to get that kind of info in the library. Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it.

Do you grok it now, Graham?

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)