Thursday, March 9, 2017

Week 3: Text Profile Comparisons


Text Profiling

The four types of words categorized by the Text Profiler are:
Type 1: BNC 1-2000 - Two thousand most common words in English according to Nation's British National Corpus (BNC)-based lists.
Type 2: AWL words - 570 high-frequency general academic words on Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL).
Type 3: AWL & 2000 (Overlaps) – words that appear on both the AWL and BNC 1-2000 lists.
Type 4: Off-list words that do not appear in the first 3 categories. These words include names, places, discipline-related concepts and technical terms.

I used the Text Profiler to compare four articles about electricity. They are listed below in order of decreasing complexity. I had hoped to find a greater range, but perhaps the subject does not lend itself to simplicity without too great a sacrifice in content. 
I would use this activity with eighth graders doing research projects on-line. Sometimes students have difficultly determining whether or not material matches their level of comprehension. The Text Profiler sorts the words of a text into four categories, from very common to technical, giving readers a good idea of how complex the text is. 






 






 






No comments:

Post a Comment