Last week I launched a site for Greek vocabulary. Here’s how the first week has gone.
Over time http://vocab.oxlos.org/ will contain a variety of tools for learning and assessing Greek vocabulary. As mentioned in my blog post a week ago, I’m starting with some experiments based on the work of Paul Nation.
I’m delighted with the response so far and am very thankful to everyone who has participated. In the first week 58 people signed up, 37 people completed at least one full activity with 19 completing more than one and six people completing at least four activities.
Thanks to Seumas Macdonald, I expanded the initial New Testament vocabulary testing a couple of days ago to some Patristic vocabulary. I’ll also be adding some classical Greek vocabulary soon.
As my previous post says, some of my initial research questions are:
- how reliable is a test like Nation’s vocabulary level test at estimating one’s NT Greek vocabulary size?
- how much is frequency a factor in how likely a student is to know a word?
- what other factors contribute to likelihood a student knows a word?
I do need to continue to gather data but so far the Nation-style test seems to be working well and individual frequency bands actually do seem very good indicators of overall vocabulary size. I’ll publish results with analysis over time. I’ll also continue to release new activities.
As well as expanding the vocabulary to broader corpora and other parts of speech besides nouns, I also want to explore the impact of English cognates and relatedness between lexemes due to derivation. I’ll also be adding some additional activity types based on the work of other vocabulary acquisition researchers such as Schmitt and Meara.
Thanks again to everyone who has participated so far and please continue to do so (and share a link to the site with Greek students, particularly those at a less-advanced level).