How vocabulary is learned

Vocabulary learning requires two basic conditions – repetition (quantity of meetings with words) and good quality mental processing of the meetings.  Other factors also affect vocabulary learning. For example, learners may differ greatly in their motivation to engage in learning, and words may differ greatly in their learning burden.  However, without quantity and quality of processing, learning cannot occur.  The greater the number of repetitions, the more likely learning is to occur.  The deeper and more thoughtful the quality of processing, the more likely learning is to occur.  This paper explains quantity and quality, and shows how teachers and learners can increase the quantity and quality of their processing of vocabulary, thus increasing their vocabulary size

How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?

This study looks at how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the 1st 9,000 words of English for learning to occur. It uses corpora of various sizes and composition to see how many tokens of input would be needed to gain at least twelve repetitions and to meet most of the words at eight of the nine 1000 word family levels. Corpus sizes of just under 200,000 tokens and 3 million tokens provide an average of at least 12 repetitions at the 2nd 1,000 word level and the 9th 1,000 word level respectively. In terms of novels, this equates to two to twenty-five novels (at 120,000 tokens per novel). Allowing for learning rates of around 1,000 word families a year, these are manageable amounts of input. Freely available Mid-frequency Readers have been created to provide the suitable kind of input needed

How Vocabulary is Learned

Vocabulary learning requires two basic conditions – repetition (quantity of meetings with words) and good quality mental processing of the meetings. Other factors also affect vocabulary learning. For example, learners may differ greatly in their motivation to engage in learning, and words may differ greatly in their learning burden. However, without quantity and quality of processing, learning cannot occur. The greater the number of repetitions, the more likely learning is to occur. The deeper and more thoughtful the quality of processing, the more likely learning is to occur. This paper explains quantity and quality, and shows how teachers and learners can increase the quantity and quality of their processing of vocabulary, thus increasing their vocabulary size

Testing receptive knowledge of derivational affixes

Derivational affixes create variations of meaning within word families, so learner knowledge of how derivations transform meaning can boost comprehension. This paper looks at second language (L2) learners’ receptive knowledge of unknown members of word families in order to better understand how learners encounter new forms of words with derivational affixes. Overall, the participants were able to move within word families at a receptive level but often had difficulty with non-target, sentential syntax of the British National Corpus examples. It was also found that words-per-minute was a predictor of the participants’ ability to move within word families. Finally, participants were challenged when moving from one derivational affixed target to another

Suppressing quantum circuit errors due to system variability

We present a post-compilation quantum circuit optimization technique that takes into account the variability in error rates that is inherent across present day noisy quantum computing platforms. This method consists of computing isomorphic subgraphs to input circuits and scoring each using heuristic cost functions derived from system calibration data. Using standard algorithmic test circuits we show that it is possible to recover on average nearly 40% of missing fidelity using better qubit selection via efficient to compute cost functions. We demonstrate additional performance gains by considering qubit placement over multiple quantum processors. The overhead from these tools is minimal with respect to other compilation steps such as qubit routing as the number of qubits increases. As such, our method can be used to find qubit mappings for problems at the scale of quantum advantage and beyond.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Mid-frequency readers

This article describes a new free extensive reading resource for learning the mid-frequency words of English and for reading well known texts with minor vocabulary adaptation. A gap exists between the end of graded readers at around 3,000 word families and the vocabulary size needed to read unsimplified texts at around 8,000 word families. Mid-frequency readers are designed to fill this gap. They consist of texts from Project Gutenberg adapted for learners with a vocabulary size of 4,000 word families, 6,000 word families and 8,000 word families. Each text is available at these three different levels. The goal is to have at least fifty such texts at each of the three different levels freely available. The adaptation is done using the BNC/COCA word family lists and the AntWordProfiler program. The article also discusses research that needs to be done on learning mid-frequency vocabulary and on creating and using mid-frequency readers

The four strands.

The activities in a language course can be classified into the four strands of meaningfocused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development. In a well designed course there should be an even balance of these strands with roughly equal amounts of time given to each strand. The research evidence for the strands draws on the input hypothesis and learning from extensive reading, the output hypothesis, research on form-focused instruction, and the development of speaking and reading fluency. The paper concludes with 10 principles based largely on the four strands. The strands framework and the principles provide a basis for managing innovation in language courses