As students move into middle and high school, challenges with multisyllabic words come to the fore. In her AERA Distinguished Scholar presentation (SIG: Reading and Literacy), Freddy asked how corpus linguistics could pinpoint the multisyllabic words most worth teaching.
Thought Experiment #2:
Longer Texts with Target Morphemes
- Identify the 3+ syllable words among the most frequent 1500 words in written English: EWFG database followed by SCOPE ”number of syllable” analysis: 175 3+ syllable words
- Using dELP, pick 25 most difficult words
- Identify family members of target words: EWFG
The exercise had three steps. First, she identified the three-syllable words within the 1,500 most-frequent written-English words in the Educator’s Word Frequency Guide (EWFG) — yielding 175 candidates. Second, she used the developmental English Lexicon Project (dELP) to flag the 25 hardest. Third, she returned to the EWFG to map the morphological families around them.
Two emerged as a promising pairing for a WordRoots text: variety (7 family members) and production (10). In a 240-word text built around them, Freddy landed 11 appearances of each word and its family members.
Producing a Variety Show (PDF)
Is that enough exposure for students to master these families? More importantly, is it enough to spark generalization to other multisyllabic words? Those questions remain open. But texts engineered to deliver repeated, meaningful encounters with morphological family members appear to be a promising first step — and corpus tools make the engineering tractable.
Learn More
Watch a special Zoom preview version of Freddy’s AERA Distinguished Scholar presentation (SIG: Reading and Literacy) presentation. (The thought experiment in this post begins at 38:58.)
