Thanks for the helpful suggestions, everyone. Louis, I’ll look forward to the statistics from Graben.
A new idea for me coming out of this conversation is to ditch vocab frequency lists in 2nd year classes, and only require students to learn the vocabulary that we actually encounter in readings. To be sure, students need to acquire vocabulary if they are to read with any comfort, but the effort of memorizing lists of vocabulary words without contextual reinforcement is inefficient, tedious, frustrating and—for those who don’t keep using the language after the course is done—ultimately wasted.
I am more likely to achieve my goal of motivating students to continue reading Greek after classes are through if there is a direct connection between vocabulary and reading. And if we read enough texts, the result in terms of acquired vocabulary, may be similar.
