Today I’m working on a template for a vocabulary diagnostic. The one I’ve been using in my training is starting to feel a bit old, especially since the teaching I do around this has evolved into a slightly different thing.
However, it’s given me the opportunity to use a really fantastic piece of online vocabulary software again.
If you haven’t seen this, you should check it out. You paste in your text and the software sorts the vocabulary in your text into different word frequency levels.
This is based on some of the work that Paul Nation and others have done with vocabulary in an ESOL context. However, I think it totally works in a literacy context as well.
It’s not a very beautiful website to look at. However, it’s worth taking the time to have a play with it and see what it does.
I’m going to dump the entire content of the two reference books we use into it – The Learning Progressions for Adult Literacy and Numeracy.
I’m then going to use words from these texts in my model example of the vocabulary pre-test that I want to use in my course later in the week.
If I get it finished in time, I’ll upload the results here, and possibly more of the process as well.