Vocabulary Difficulty and Textbook Selection by Carl L. Johnson

Article                         : Vocabulary Difficulty and Textbook Selection

Writer                          : Carl L. Johnson

Journal                         : The Modern Language Journal

Date Published            : 20/05/2008   

The author attempts to supply information useful in selecting French reading texts. He grades reading texts by determining the relative degree of difficulty of their vocabularies. He offers to use standardized checking lists in order to avoid haphazard and unscientific methods of selection. First, he calculates running word count and the number of sources to which a word is common. He has examined and combined the vocabulary indices of twenty high school reading texts selected with regard to the following factors: (1) author, (2) time written, (3) setting, (4) type, i.e. drama, novel, poetry, etc., (5) popularity4 in schools at present. After that, he makes the list of the common words based on the calculation. However, in this case, he prefers to use the list of 3600 common word of Dr. Henmon. Then, someone who wants to select reading texts can use this list to grading the difficulty of the vocabulary using in the text. First, the person should calculate how many words using in the selecting text and each word frequency. After that, the person should match each word frequency in the selecting text with the author list of 3600 common words. If all words in the selecting text score less than 0.6, we give it a checklist as less frequent. It means that the text is difficult. He concludes this article by recommending using this technique because it is objective, easily and quickly applied; measures relative difficulty; is applicable to all types of French reading texts; and is valid in that it measures what it attempts to measure.

            The article emerged as a respond to a recent issue of the MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL; in which Dr. A. Green expresses the need of standardized checking lists. The role of the author in this article is to introduce his standardized checking list which uses the list of common words of Dr. Hommon, A French Word Book.

            I agree with this concept that to select reading text must consider the grade of the text. A text can be graded by the difficulty of vocabularies used in the text. I think it is true because sometimes I feel reading certain book is difficult because the book uses unfamiliar vocabularies. So, I think the grade of the book isn’t appropriate to my capacities.

            I have read a topic related to selecting vocabularies. Selecting vocabulary can be from concrete to abstract; simple to complex; or frequent to less frequent. Selecting vocabulary based on its frequency is like what this article explains. We must count some textbook words and calculate what words are more frequent, called common words. Commonly, experts use computers to calculate them effectively.