26.10.11

Text Analysis

I think readability is how much it is easy to understand a particular text. I mean to what extent this text includes frequently used words. I want to learn;
How can I make a text more readable with the help of using the computer to determine readability?
Now I have completed the activities about text analysis and I think for reading these tols are really good for teachers.
 Vocabulary profiling is the tool that gives us our text's lexical frequency profile. We can easily determine which words are more frequent in the text we are going to give the students. We can realize whether to teach or not some of the words in advance. Also, we can determine which words to focus on more.
I also liked the concordances tool very much. With the help of it, we can see how our frequent words in the text are used in other contexts. It is useful because we can teach the word in other contexts and students can have a broader concept of words we are working on.
I do not see any problems related to twxt analysis except for 'time'. Teachers have to have lots of time before coming to class with a ' well-determined-prepared text'. And, usually they have their printed text which they extract from an old book.
To sum up, I want to give answer to my question above :)
1.Get a text
2.Look at its readability statistics.If it seems that it is suitable for your students, go on.
3.Look at its vocabulary profile.
4.Design pre-reading activities on less-frequent words if necessary.
5. Look at the text's concordances.
6.Design activities to make students aware of keywords' usage in other contexts.
     Then, I think you can have a good text to give your students.
     If you think I missed some parts let me know :)

3 comments:

Meral said...

Yes, you are absolutely right about that these tools has only one drawback,it takes some extra time to prepare instruction materials the teacher will use.

Steve Neufeld said...

Great summary. While Meral is right about taking extra time, the added value you can get from a text, and the more ways you can exploit a text, may in the end save your time from preparing lots of other activities. Also, once the students are familiar with your approach, you can start to teach them to do this for themselves.

esra karan said...

I think we should get used to this as soon as we start to teach.
Start big and you’ll end big.( a nice quotation from a play in Drama Analysis :)