Re: Format for addressing grade-level content........

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