My BibleTech 2010 Talk

Yesterday I gave a talk on the graded reader ideas at BibleTech.

Here is a video of my talk.

The abstract:

We will discuss a new approach to language learning based on texts, with a special focus on learning Greek from the New Testament.

We will be covering how various linguistic analyses of a text such as the Greek New Testament can help determine the order in which vocabulary and grammar is introduced and how each new word or grammatical concept can be shown in the context of the text.

Lastly, we will also discuss various algorithms that have been implemented as well as open source Python code for producing this new kind of graded reader.

at the intersection of computing, linguistics, philology, and learning science

By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.