Telling Students Vocabulary Coverage Statistics

[jtauber]

Concrete nouns can often be learnt in isolation but almost every thing else should probably be learnt in multi-word constructions. Even nouns should probably be learnt in constructions with the article (based on 1LA stuff I've read about acquisition of gender/agreement).

With our treebanks, it's fairly easy to generate constructions with various constraints (e.g. [1]) and my "New Kind of Graded Reader" algorithms from 2008 / 2010 provide somewhat of a way of ordering them for ability to read more, faster and even inline them in English for context[2]. The problem at the time, was of course, the morphological stuff which is why I went back to morphology the last few years, to get that in better shape

James

[1] http://jktauber.com/2010/04/14/all-subt ... t-clauses/
[2] http://jktauber.com/2010/04/25/inline-r ... nt-john-2/

[Stephen Hughes]

I think the term "learn" needs to be looked at.

Forms of the verb to be are not learnt the same way as the indeclinables. It is knowledge to know it is the verb to be, it is a skill to know that the 2nd singular is there or has to be produced in a second singular situation, and so on.

Reducing analysis to individual forms seems to put the 3-D into 2-D. There is a whole system of grammar that exists within the language that students won't be exposed to in the abstract if the discrete forms are learnt individually. Reading or other exposure to the language would help with that.

[jtauber]

I think the term "learn" needs to be looked at.

Forms of the verb to be are not learnt the same way as the indeclinables. It is knowledge to know it is the verb to be, it is a skill to know that the 2nd singular is there or has to be produced in a second singular situation, and so on.

Reducing analysis to individual forms seems to put the 3-D into 2-D. There is a whole system of grammar that exists within the language that students won't be exposed to in the abstract if the discrete forms are learnt individually. Reading or other exposure to the language would help with that.

Yep, that's why I would much rather see a list of constructions where each form of the verb to be is used rather than a paradigm.

[Jonathan Robie]

Yep, that's why I would much rather see a list of constructions where each form of the verb to be is used rather than a paradigm.

+1

[Stephen Hughes]

Yep, that's why I would much rather see a list of constructions where each form of the verb to be is used rather than a paradigm.

+1

My naive assumption is that sentence patterns which is good for a certain person and number can be fully coaxed into every other person and number, if there is a communicative need. Is that true, a good starting point to base a list of irregulars on, or just a foolish / wishful generalisation?