To revolutionize vocabulary learning
by mimicking the way the brain naturally acquires word knowledge.
Do you ever ask yourself why you don't have a high vocabulary? How are you different from those who do?
I got a clue while in college. The students who whipped the SAT Verbal all
had one thing in common - they read … a lot. Their reading started early in life
and it included anything they could get their hands on. So it's certainly plausible that …
Avid reading is correlated with a high vocabulary level.
Why should this be? Well, those who read encounter more words than those who don't read.
Of these encountered words, some will inevitably be difficult words - words that are unknown.
Perhaps by running into these difficult words over and over, the reader builds a mental image of the
word?
Words can be learned from context
Why not build a web page that allows one to see see difficult words used in context? Wouldn't that help
someone understand the word better? What is seen on the homepage is my first pass at such a tool.
However, I rarely learned words from using it, I mostly read the definitions and maybe an example or two.
The knowledge was ephemeral and days later, it was gone and I was frustrated. What was I doing wrong?
Could it be that …
Words have to be seen in many contexts, over time
As one reads, the same difficult word is not usually encountered many times in a row. The readings are
varied in subject matter and spaced out over months or even years. With this insight, I began to build
the core of DictionarySquared - the training program.
DictionarySquared will step you through a list of difficult words. Each word will be shown used in context.
The contexts (or "snippets") come from writing across the internet.
I try my best to only show you good writing. If you think there's something wrong with a particular snippet, you can
always skip it.
You should initially read eight snippets per word. I'll force you to write your own definition after reading five snippets.
Don't worry, it goes quickly once you get the hang of it.
After every five words, you'll be quizzed with 15 questions. The quiz format is fill-in-the-blank. If you don't like the
question, you can skip it, but you only get a few skips per quiz.
There will also be reviews through email. This way I insure you remember the words.
If you're not around your computer, be sure to print out your flashcards which will contain your definition, a dictionary
definition and your favorite snippet!
Learning vocabulary via inference from contextual passages is not an original concept. In fact, academics have been
researching this phenomenon for about 100 years. It is pretty much accepted as fact, but researchers still disagree about nuances.
A particularly interesting breakthrough was the work of Nagy & Anderson in 1984. They were able to count
the number of words used in high-school English. The result was about 90,000 distinct, semantically
independent word-groups. If an average student knew just half of those, do the math: they start reading at age 5,
graduate at age 18, so 45,000 words in 14yrs is approximately 9 words/day. Since students rarely look up words in the dictionary,
and vocabulary is seldom taught in school (and certainly never on such a scale), it must be that students learn these 9 words everyday
from seeing the words used in context.
Attempts were made on measuring incremental gains from context with degrees of success (see Nagy, Herman & Anderson, 1985; Nagy, Anderson &
Herman, 1987; Schatz & Baldwin, 1986; Herman, Anderson, Pearson & Nagy, 1987; Schwanenflugel, Stahl & McFalls, 1997).
Researchers generally agree that word knowledge is accumulated gradually over many exposures and is a mostly
involuntary process. We encounter a word we don't know and we "skip" it. However,
we subconsiously remember a little something about it. More chance exposures reinforce this knowledge and
allows us to "decontextualize" the meaning of the word. We understand the abstract
concept; this is the way we "define" the word.
Verbal sections of standardized tests such as the SAT, ACT, and GRE attempt to gauge the taker's "verbal IQ,"
or their degree of "verbal sophistication," which is built-up over years of experience. A person's natural vocabulary
level is reflective of this sophistication. Therefore, using DictionarySquared will
build the following skills:
a) Reading Comprehension
The single most important determinant of reading comprehension is whether or not
the reader was familiar with the passage's words. As a crude example:
"I walked to the store. I bought a banana. I came home."
Unambiguous, huh? How about this:
"Come closer, plebeian individual, and savor the piquancy of my salubrious, though phantasmal, comestibles!"
Case in point. If you learn more vocabulary using DictionarySquared's natural methods, your reading
comprehension score will improve.
b) Vocabulary Inference
Many SAT questions are testing the taker's ability to infer word meanings from context (e.g. "On the line above, the word
'plebeian' most likely means . . .") Since inference is the natural way to learn vocabulary, the more
vocabulary you learn using DictionarySquared's natural method, the better you'll be at answering these questions.
c) Sentence completions
The difficult questions always test some nuance of the word's meaning. In order to answer correctly, you need to
experience these nuances, only be seeing the word crafted artfully in context.
In conclusion, not only are you learning more words by using DictionarySquared, but you're raising the whole boat
- your verbal sophistication increases. No gimmicks, no artificial ingredients. This is natural learning,
just accelerated: think intravenous injections of Red Bull.
It is difficult to "game" the test. How does one fake a level of sophistication they don't have?
Therefore, test-score-improving programs are limited if they only teach tips and tricks because they don't improve
the taker's underlying sophistication.
Wordlist-learning is one of these tricks. It gives the illusion of real understanding of the word. Words can never be
precisely defined using other words. Dictionary entries are just rough approximations.
Let's see an example. On a wordlist, the word "redress" is defined as "set right; repair; remedy." Using this definition,
does the following sentence make sense?
"The redress for being sick is to stay in bed"
According to the definition, yes. However, if you really understood the concept of a redress, you would know
that this example sentence is ridiculous.
In fact, it has been demonstrated in the academic literature that wordlists (i.e. conventional definitions) are ineffective in
building vocabulary knowledge (see Scott & Nagy, 1997). Yet, our culture still obsesses with wordlists and it is taken
for granted to be the definitive way to study vocabulary. The time is ripe for revolution.
The wordlist proponents' fundamental assertion - "words exclusively mean what their
wordlist definitions say they mean" - is incorrect. My wordlist says "redress" means "repair" but I guarantee you that
"redress" is a lot more nuanced of a concept than "repair." English doesn't exhibit pure rendundancy. Words
are more than the sum of their definitional parts. The Aristotelian theory of the dictionary is wrong!
Further, word knowledge is not an on-off light switch. There's a continuous spectrum from "never seeing the word before"
(zero knowledge) to being able to "use the word playfully beyond its definition" (full knowledge, in my opinion). The
only way to achieve this full knowledge is (and I'm going to drill this over and over again) to see the word in context
many times, from many angles to understand the nuances. Words are unique and fascinating and the only way to respect them
is to experience them.
Knowing the wordlist definition is a very basic level of knowledge, a deceiving level of knowledge. Memorizing a wordlist is akin to
putting up sleek flagpoles then kicking back when you really should be building skyscrapers complete with concrete foundations,
steel wiregrid infrastructure, wood joists and studs, sheetrock, glass, and furnishings.
Terman, the inventor of the IQ test, said that if he had the choice of only one section of the many IQ test
subsections to administer, he'd give the vocabulary subtest due to its highest correlation with the individual's
overall IQ.
The question is why so?
The answer may lie in the fundamental principle that each word represents a distinct concept. Knowing a word means
knowing a concept. "A richer vocabulary does not just mean we know more words, but that we have more
complex and exact ways of talking about the world . . . the more distinctions we can make about the world"
(Stahl, 1999, p1).
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Stahl SA 1999
Vocabulary Development
Brookline Books, MA
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Schwanenflugel PJ Stahl SA McFalls EL 1997
Partial word knowledge and vocabulary growth during reading comprehension
Journal of Literacy Research 29:4 pp531-553
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Scott JA Nagy WE 1997
Understanding the definition of unfamiliar verbs
Reading Research Quarterly 32:2 pp184-200
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Herman PA Anderson RC Pearson PD Nagy WE 1987
Incidental Acquisition of Word Meanings from Expositions
Reading Research Quarterly 22:3 pp439-453
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Schatz EK Baldwin RS 1986
Context Clues are Unreliable Predictors of Word Meanings
Reading Research Quarterly 21:4 pp439-453
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Nagy WE Herman PA Anderson RC 1985
Learning Words from Context
Reading Research Quarterly 20:2 pp233-253
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Nagy WE Anderson RC 1984
How many words are there in printed English?
Reading Research Quarterly 19:2 pp304-330
