National Institute for Literacy
 

[EnglishLanguage 2401] Re: advancing competency

stephen churchville schurchville at hotmail.com
Tue May 13 08:06:34 EDT 2008



Hi,
The thesaurus/dictionary thread is interesting and relates to work some colleagues and I have been doing for a while now.

We found dictionaries to be overwhelming sometimes, with multiple definitions that can mislead. Our approach has been to offer only the definition that fits the context the word is being used in, and to pre-teach words to ESL learners but add it as a lexicon for non-ESL students.

We made a web application that automates these steps, so you can just copy & paste reading material into a web page and the application analyzes it for vocabulary, then the dominant phonemes in those words, and next word roots & stems. In addition to those vocabulary building components, the application adds syntax and comprehension questions.

So far we have good responses to our work, and are very interested in getting feedback from more teachers so we can continue to improve it.

If you're interested, just copy any text, go to www.lessonwriter.com and try it out.

Thanks
Stephen
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