In my teaching I have found that students can sometimes be surprisingly credulous about what is being communicated to them by images, whether it’s conveyed by a doctored photo or in the nonverbal message sent by a carefully selected image accompanying a story.   Even my friends who should know better do not always think as critically about images as they might about text.

Here’s an example.  As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children look that good in a bikini?!”  The people who forwarded this were trustworthy enough, but I knew you can’t always believe what you see, when it comes to online images.  So, I did a little digging and came up with this original, on the blog ‘Urban Legends‘:

The blog author notes that “the resulting montage was obviously intended to satirize Sarah Palin’s image as a ‘gun-toting beauty queen.’” It was an early entry in the contest to come up with the funniest sendup of this suddenly buzz-worthy candidate, though it was soon trumped by the Tina Fey imitations, which used video to even greater effect.

I have used this type of Photoshopped image to help students recognize that they should be cautious about the source and substance of material they find online, including images, and just because they agree with the politics of the sender does not absolve them of the need to think critically.  The not-too-difficult search for the origin of the image also makes a useful, topical lesson for students in how we can use the vast amount of chat, data, news, and info online to check facts against many reliable sources until we come up with something close to ‘the truth.’

Now I have to sign off and go catch up on the news, from my favorite hard news source, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

I returned from Kenya over a month ago and am still reflecting on the conversations that I had there with teachers, students, administrators, and officials at the Kenya Institute of Education. There’s so much to think about and digest. The one thing, however, that I have been thinking about ever since I came back is the lack of reading culture in Kenyan schools. One of the main things that all English teachers we worked with wanted to learn from our workshops was how to encourage reading in their classrooms.

You may think that this problem is not unique to Kenya, that in many classrooms in wealthy developed nations students are also often uninterested in reading. I agree. As an English teacher in Canada I often struggled with this challenge in my classroom. However, in Kenya, this problem is compounded by some deep-rooted issues that have been part of the education system since Kenya gained independence in 1963.

First, almost all the students and teachers we came into contact with in the rural schools we visited speak English as their second or even third language. Yet, when teachers speak of encouraging a culture of reading, they invariably mean the culture of reading in English. In other words, they want to encourage a culture of reading in a language that students use very rarely outside the classroom.

Second, the Kenyan system of education is dominated by exams which play a crucial role in deciding the students’ future. Results obtained on these exams determine whether or not the student can move on to the next grade, to high school, or to post-secondary education. If the results are not high enough, the student is almost always left without options.

English as a Second/Third Language

Kiswahili and English are both taught in Kenyan schools. Kiswahili is the language of instruction in grades 1 through 3, while English is taught as a subject. In grade 4, English replaces Kiswahili as the language of instruction and Kiswahili is taught as a subject until grade 12. The language policy is bilingual, but from what we’ve observed some Kenyans are monolingual, some bilingual, and some multilingual. In other words, most of the children we observed and most of the teachers we worked with speak three languages: they speak their mother tongue (Kikuyu in the region we visited), Kiswahili, and also English. English is not the language you hear on the street in small towns and villages in rural Kenya. It is rarely used by the students outside of class time.

What this means in the classroom is that the mother tongue or Kiswahili are used quite often. Occasionally, even the teacher uses the mother tongue or Kiswahili to explain challenging concepts (personal observation; Muthwii, 2004). Also, when students converse with each other, both in class and outside instructional times, they very rarely use English. I observed this phenomenon in every elementary and secondary school we visited.

English is therefore seen in very pragmatic terms. It is used to obtain an education and write exams. As a result, students do not use colloquial English, and it could even be argued that in a country where English is often a third language, there are limited opportunities for them to do so. As Commeyras and Inyega argue, “their instruction in English typically lacks meaningful interactive use in meaningful contexts” (2007). English is not the language of social interaction. Code-switching is very common in instructional contexts. The use of Kiswahili or mother tongue among students outside of class is the norm. Voluntary reading in English is therefore rare because English is perceived as a tool used only to pass exams and secure employment (Commeyras & Inyega, 2007).

Exams

This lack of interest in English is greatly exacerbated by the fact that, in Kenya, students write exams at the end of every grade. They must pass that final exam to proceed to the next grade. They also write a cumulative exam at the end of elementary school (grade 8). Known as the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE), this exam determines whether or not the child will go on to secondary school and also the kind of secondary school he or she will attend. Then, at the end of high school, students write another exam, known as the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE). This exam determines whether or not the student can be considered for admission to a post-secondary institution.

If a child fails either one of the exams, her educational opportunities end. She will not proceed to high school or post-secondary education. She cannot try again. Her entire life depends on two hours at the end of grade eight or grade twelve.

Needless to say, reading and the use of English are associated with formal schooling. One uses the language to prepare for and pass exams. Reading and writing in English are perceived as skills that students need to develop to function successfully in school, not something that a student perceives as valuable (or even usable) outside the classroom in her community and in social contexts.

So What?

Imagine trying to build a culture of reading in English in a classroom where the students see English only as a means to an end. It’s a language they do not use in their daily lives outside of school. In fact, students in rural communities do not have many opportunities to practice the language in interactive and meaningful social contexts. This lack of what Commeyras and Inyega call “enabling environment” (2007) certainly contributes to the students’ perception that English is a tool one must master only in order to study and pass exams. It is not personally meaningful at all. English is predominantly the language of academic contexts.

One could argue that reading in English could help the students increase their chances of performing well on their exams. Unfortunately, the exams consist of fill in the blanks questions, and some multiple choice and short answer questions. They certainly do not require too much critical thinking. Rote memorization is quite sufficient.

Can Anything Be Done?

While I agree that it is challenging to encourage students to use English outside of school where they seem perfectly happy communicating in their mother tongue or Kiswahili, it is imperative that the use of English in school change from purely formal and transactional to more expressive, interactive, and socially meaningful. One of the main barriers that has traditionally made this shift impossible is that teaching in Kenya is very teacher-centred. In addition, instruction in an English classroom is often limited to cloze tests, reading comprehension exercises, and short answer questions. Students are generally not given opportunities to express their opinions or engage in class discussions or debates. Chalk and talk dominates classroom interactions.

But, how do we encourage teachers in Kenya to adopt a more student-centred approach? How can we support them in this shift to a more participatory environment?

I think that the small, gradual steps - the approach we used this past summer - are necessary to help teachers move out of their current comfort zone and test themselves using a different teaching methodology. According to Commeyras and Inyega (2007), two research-based Kenyan documents (MOEST, 2001; Willis, 1988) suggest that teachers can promote greater interest in reading by reading aloud to their students. Furthermore, talking with students about the texts as preparation for independent reading can also be very effective (Willis, 1988). Of course, the challenge here is that this approach requires that the teachers themselves be committed and enthusiastic readers willing to share their personal stories and reactions with their students. I believe that the students need to see in their teachers a high level of authentic engagement with a text in order to be encouraged by this approach. Teachers need to learn how to communicate their passion for reading and they need support in learning how to initiate and sustain meaningful conversations about texts in their classrooms. This is not an easy task for a teacher who is used to lecturing and who every day walks into a classroom where the students have been conditioned to sit quietly and listen.

I learned this past summer that creating a participatory environment in Kenya involves two steps:

1. Helping the teacher understand the value of the Socratic method and student voice in the classroom

2. Helping the teacher convey that value to students who have spent years in a teacher-centred system that rewards those who are quiet and equate learning with rote memorization.

The teachers who attended the TWB-Canada workshops in Kenya were very open to new ideas and most were very enthusiastic about creating a more student-centred environment in their classrooms. I look forward to meeting many of them again next summer and I plan to continue to work on encouraging independent reading and an open, participatory classroom culture.

Access to Reading Materials

The importance of independent reading has been addressed by the Kenyan Ministry of Education (MOEST, 2001). The ministry even listed a number of suggestions to encourage reading in Kenyan classrooms:

MOEST (2001) provides a variety of ways for encouraging students to read, including setting aside time each week to be used for reading in class; specifying the amount of reading to be done out of class and keeping a record to track the reading that the pupil has done; asking students to give oral reports of what they are reading; using resource persons to read to the pupils, modeling how they want the pupils to read; and rewarding effort made to read (Commeyras & Inyega, 2007).

The one barrier that still needs to be addressed, however, is the question of access. When we discuss independent reading in North America,  or in any developed nation, we don’t spend too much time thinking about access to appropriate materials. We take for granted that students have access to libraries, either in their schools or in the community. We know that their parents can also purchase books or magazines. Access to reading material is not an issue.

In Kenya, things are very different. Efforts to encourage independent reading will be pointless if the students have no access to reading materials. While some schools we visited in rural Kenya had small libraries or book collections, most did not have any reading material except textbooks. Consequently, another goal for our next project in Kenya is to help improve access to reading materials by fundraising for paperbacks or magazine subscriptions that can be purchased locally to eliminate shipping costs.

In short, as I begin to prepare for next year’s Teachers Without Borders workshops in Kenya, I think about how we can best assist Kenyan teachers in creating an environment in their classrooms where the students will be given opportunities to share their views, participate in debates, and use English in an expressive, creative way, not merely as a tool to help them fill in the blanks on a test. The teachers I met in Kenya were very open to making the kind of shift in their pedagogy that is required to ensure that their students have opportunities to move away from the formal and transactional uses of English and towards a more expressive and personal voice. At the same time, I realize that access to paperbacks and magazines will be crucial and I hope that, as a team, Teachers Without Borders - Canada will be able to raise enough funds to bring more books to Kenyan classrooms.

If you think you might be able to help, please let me know.

References:

Commeyras, M. & Inyega, H. (2007). An integrative review of teaching reading in Kenyan primary schools. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(2), 258-281.

Ministry of Education Science and Technology. (2001). Teaching and learning English in the primary classroom: English module. Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation.

Muthwii, M. (2004). Language of instruction: A qualitative analysis of the perception of parents, pupils, and teachers among the Kalenjin in Kenya. Language, Culture, and Curriculum, 17, 15-32.

Willis, B.J. (1988). Aspects of the acquisition of orality and literacy in Kenyan primary school children (Kiswahili). Dissertation Abstracts International, 50, 433. (UMI No. 8908590).

It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material—whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance—and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes—after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school—I cannot help but think that if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college work, and what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?

But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that we do here at the institute, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills, the hallmarks of a good education? Shouldn’t every class be writing and communication intensive?

Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, or whatever, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think write and communicate, and to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm, is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them after all, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement only twice during their college career, only underlines the idea that the classes that emphasize these skills are just another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”

I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all too often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.

It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn.

I just read an interesting article by Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle about how students’ approaches to reading and interacting with information online seem to be hindering their ability to read and learn from texts in more traditional settings.  Specifically, he contends that:

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions as educators are increasingly trying to incorporate some of these technologies into the classroom and publishers are pushing textbook content into more profitable eBooks.  Are we actually helping students by doing all of this?  Some initial studies of middle and high school students suggest that technology-intensive curricula do not improve student achievement.

Bauerlein has many interesting points in the article and makes a good case for “unplugging” some aspects of teaching and learning.  However, in my opinion, the question of whether or not technology in general improves/impairs student learning is not that interesting.  Instead, we should be focusing our assessments on understanding which technologies can be usefully employed in which aspects of the curricula.  Finding pedagogical fit for relevant technologies seems to be what we are striving towards at BLSCI.  Thus, as an institute, we undoubtedly have much to contribute to this important discussion.

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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.

14 Comments

• At July 15, 2008, Arthus Erea wrote:

  Wow! Thanks for sharing this... it looks incredibly useful and far more statistically justifiable than Wordle. There's no point in having a pretty visualization if the underlying statistics aren't useful.

  Also, I'm with you there on Quizlet: I've been using it for a couple of years for all of my low-level-subject quiz testing. However, the one thing it doesn't support is multiple choice questions (which Mystudiyo does).

  Finally, just for kicks I plugged in a few blog posts into the profiler (both by me and others): over 15-20% of words were on the Off-list, but this is skewed by the pervasiveness of buzzwords (Twitter, digital footprint) which the average person doesn't know, but anyone worth their hosting in the Edublogosphere does.

  Arthus Ereas last blog post..The 140 Character Lesson

• At July 15, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Arthus,

  Glad you see the value. And good point about buzzwords and proper nouns. You can exclude them by entering them in the "exclude" box on the site before submitting to get more valid results, and for purposes of readability level evaluation, maybe should.

  Or you could just count the number of buzzwords, subtract them from the breakdown, and mentally calculate the new ratio of offlist words, I guess. I'd have to ask somebody who can add, subtract, and figure percentages to do that for me, though.

  The really cool thing about Quizlet, as I'm sure you know, is that it was created by a high schooler, not a British Ed. D. candidate. ;-)

• At July 15, 2008, Arthus Erea wrote:

  Clay,

  Yup, I've actually talked with him on quite a few occasions. He might possibly be the only high schooler on the 'net who is smarter than me. :P (just kidding: we all know that is Lindsea)

  Arthus Ereas last blog post..The 140 Character Lesson

• At July 15, 2008, Tod Baker wrote:

  For English language learners and native speakers, this looks like a tool that can help teachers differentiate effectively. I'll look into it further. Thanks.

  Tod

  Tod Bakers last blog post..Layout Frustrations

• At July 16, 2008, Robb McCollum wrote:

  Thanks for the explanation and link (my wife passed on your blog from a twitter feed she got). I've been trying to use corpus research more in my teaching including Mark Davies corpus.byu.edu

  However, it's nice to have a fast and easy-to-use tool so that graduate ESL students can start taking responsibility for their own vocabulary development. WordCruncher is powerful, but web-accessible and perhaps too complex for casual users. Besides, the connection to the AWL and other word lists is very helpful. Great tool!

• At July 16, 2008, Corrie Bergeron wrote:

  Excellent! Sending it along to my English and medical terminology faculty (big nursing/allied health programs here), as well as the manager of the ESL tutors. Good stuff!

• At July 16, 2008, diane wrote:

  A little gift from a long-time admirer ;-)

  http://animoto.com/play/YrgMD4CVkDohywg3QPhV9g?autostart=false

  dianes last blog post..Where in the World? Part 2

• At July 16, 2008, Nate Stearns wrote:

  Interesting. I plopped in Act I, Scenes 1-2 of Macbeth and got a cool little red list (alarum_[1] anon_[1] assault_[1] attendants_[1] bade_, etc.) of vocab words to preteach. Vocabulary has never been my bag, baby, as I was traumatized by stupid lists as a child. Still, I do like the idea of using the Vocab profile to have kids check out vocab list beforehand. Many of the major works we teach are often online in full text form and--theoretically-you could have kids drop in the chapter, do a post on the vocab, do the reading, and then revisit the vocab...Doesn't sound like a total blast, but worth trying.

  Nate Stearnss last blog post..Edu-flash Mobs, why not?

• At July 16, 2008, OLDaily ~ by Stephen Downes wrote:

  [...] to develop quizzes, among many possible uses. -HJ Clay Burell, Beyond School, July 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [...]

• At July 16, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nate,

  Shakespeare is so close to a foreign language in comparison with contemporary English, it's no wonder you're going to have a massive list of offlist (red) words.

  Couple that with the research on readability, and you have the main factor in kids not loving Shakespeare like we do: far less than 95% lexical familiarity.

  I _always_ pre-teach words like "anon, e'er, soft, aye," and a million other high-frequency Elizabethan words - let's not forget thee, thou, thine, the royal we and our, on and on - before even starting any play. I put them on a word wall and revisit them regularly.

  But think about what would happen if you input the ENTIRE play into the profiler: you'd get a list of the most frequent words in the play, and that should be a valuable guide in helping you identify which words in that sea deserve most emphasis.

  Gotta run.

• At July 16, 2008, Biblical Studies and Technological Tools: Vocabulary Profiling wrote:

  [...] To understand what this tool does, it helps to understand a bit of corpus linguistics, but this blog posting will give you a quick background. I've talked about this kind of stuff before with reference to [...]

• At July 19, 2008, A World History Book for All Ages and Reading Levels: Gombrich’s “A Little History of the World” | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of [...]

• At July 21, 2008, PaulV8 wrote:

  Thanks for posting this, Clay. I've enjoyed your blogging. You are an inspiring teacher. I'll have to try this out since I may have 11th and 12th grade remediation English classes this year. Heck, this will help any classes.

  PaulV8s last blog post..iPhone Updates: Prologue and Mdot

• At July 21, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Paul,

  Such a nice gesture to receive in a rough week. Thanks for that.

  Clay

A while ago, I made my first trip to Comerica Park, the stadium where my beloved Detroit Tigers play their home games. I say “play their home games” because to me, Tiger Stadium will always be their true home, even if in the future it’s left only partially standing. I grew up about an hour from the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and my trips to that grimy cathedral were always something special. The place was beautifully disgusting, crusted with the cheers (and spit) of generations of faithful. Above all, it had character so palpable that it didn’t matter if half your view of the field was obstructed.

Tiger Stadium photo credit: hassgocubs

I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.

So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.

Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786

As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.

Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.

Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.

The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.

Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd

One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.

At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.

Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.

At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.

The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.

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In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com.  For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online.  While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away.  The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources. 

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

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This morning, Doug Noon shared a post entitled “The Fiction of Intellectual Property.” The post and the comments are thoughtful, but ultimately frustrating. What follows isn’t a direct response (hence, I didn’t leave a comment), but just some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for a while related to that post and many others like it.

For a while now, it has seemed to me that the two “sides” of the IP/copyright debate have made little progress with the other side mainly because of fear. Each side is unwilling to admit compromise out of the fear that the other side will be unwilling to admit compromise, resulting, stupidly and predictably, in a stalemate.

If IP supporters could admit that the law unfairly benefits the corporations and that those laws need to change, and if the IP opponents could admit that a change in the law does not mean an overthrow of all laws, then both sides might be able to actually have a conversation about the best ways to bring fair and balanced change, rather than just screaming at each other across an imaginary line.

The founders were concerned with having a system in place that would encourage the sharing of ideas and thus established a “limited monopoly” on those ideas to provide the creators of those ideas the chance to profit from them. The system in which ideas are shared is certainly more complex now, but the basic principle is unchanged: a society that wants to encourage the sharing of ideas must provide those who are creating those ideas the chance (not guarantee, and only for a limited time) to profit from their work. Why is this position so hard to agree upon as a starting point for moving forward with the details?

The most reasoned discussion I’ve found on this topic so far is still Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, in which he argues that the laws must change, but never argues for lawlessness or the denial of creators to profit from their creations.

If we continue to argue about this issue, can we at least let go of our fear of “the other” and argue about the specifics of proposed solutions that might bring us closer to a fair and balanced compromise?

I added a post on this topic to the TeachEng.us blog.  Here’s the teaser:

… if I were in the classroom right now, and had students with consistent Internet access, I think I’d ask them to keep a few different writing spaces: a private journal, a public journal, a blog “notebook” or two, and a personal wiki.

Here’s the rest of the post.

Is there room for the CPE exam in humanities and social sciences classrooms? Should there be room?

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly and deeply prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through the course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

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