- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 17:06:29 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Anne Pemberton <apembert@erols.com>
- cc: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>, Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Actually you can use the lists and say that all words not on a list are suspect. You just cannot say that they will be incomprehensible. In grade level assessment there are a number of factors that come into play. Most young kids are learning vocabulary fairly fast, and one way is by reading. (On a TV program about the body I heard it claimed that between 2 and 12 kids learn one word every two hours on average - I can believe that as a rough generalised statistic). Likewise there are probably grammar structures that can be checked for 'grade level'. But grade level even in english varies significantly from place to place - Australia, England, Guyana, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the United States, Vanuatu, and other countries where england is an official first language in education have different curricula and grade levels, especially for local words, and there are a massive number of these. And yes we are veering towards natural language processing here. Fortunately from the relatively simple end - vocabulary lookup and comparison has been with us since the 50s, basic grammar deconstruction since then as well but I think has only started to be well done since the 90s. Cheers Charles On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Anne Pemberton wrote: Kynn, It's tough to put a reading level on single words or phrases that are not part of a large body of sentences and paragraphs, because much of the complexity of reading is in the whole, rather than the parts, of the passage. There is some attempt to "grade level" certain sets of words - the ones found to occur most often in print .... are generally words taught and experienced at the lower grade levels. The two such word list are the Dolch Word List and the Fry List of Most Frequently Used Words. You cannot use these word lists to screen words and say that all words not the list are suspect for a lower level, they may not be. Anne At 11:13 AM 7/30/01 -0400, Kynn Bartlett wrote: [snip] >(Are we veering into NLP territory here?) > >--Kynn
Received on Monday, 30 July 2001 17:06:34 UTC