Usefulness of Vocabprofiler in reading and writing instruction

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Do you often feel undoubted about the appropriateness of certain reading passage?  For example, you may worry that it contains too many difficult words that beyond students' comprehension. 

Do you want to promote the lexical richness of your students' writing products? 

You will gain insights into the above questions through this blog.

Vocabprofiler by Lexical Tutor (https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/) is adopted as a powerful tool for measurement of lexical performance in English written production. Following is the interface of VocabProfilers.

Vocabprofiler calculate word frequency of four levels, including:

1) K1: the 1000 most commonly used words in English
2) K2: the 1000 next most commonly used words in English
3) AWL: Academic Word List
4) Off-list words: other words not on any of the lists (often infrequent or non-academic)

It is not unusual that students repeatedly use K1 words in their composition, sometimes even unconsciously. In this case, the K1 ratio will sound alarm bells and raise students’ awareness of employing more advanced vocabularies.

Step 1 Copy and paste students' writings in the yellow area on the left side and click on "submit" button.

Step 2 Analyzing results

The following two figures are the analysis results of vocabulary frequency. We often focus on the second figure, which displays respectively the proportion of vocabularies of four levels. 

Current profile
%	Cumul.
76.78	76.78
3.32	80.10
9.48	89.58
10.43	100.00

If we scroll down, we can find that Vocabfrofilers colored words of differents levels corresponding to the "Current Profile". 

If we continue to scroll down, there would be a "Type List", which demonstrate how many times each word in each level appears in this composition. For example, "activities" (K1 level)  is overused (used for up to five times) in this short paragraph. Teachers can guide students to try to replace the overused K1 words with synonyms with the help of the corpus, thus improving lexical richness of their writings.

Step 3 Teachers can set a worksheet as followed. 

Provide students with a sample essay and encourage students to make a comparison between this essay and their own compositions so that the gap is visualized.

Students are advised to keep a record of their own vocabulary profile and track the development of lexical frequency over time. This is constructive for L2 writing.

Step 4 Identify appropriate reading materials through Vocabprofilers

Step 1 to Step 3 generally introduces how Vocabprofilers function in improving writing proficiency. This step is to inform its usefulness in selecting appropriate reading materials for students. The following is the analysis results of an essay retrieved from The Economics, the high percentage of the off-list words indicates the great challenge for high-school students to understand this passage.  

Current profile
%	Cumul.
61.87	61.87
5.84	67.71
7.39	75.10
24.90	100.00

That's all for today's blog~ And this is just the basic function of Vocabprofilers. For further exploration, 
the following video might make sense for you guys. It extends the usage of "VP Compleat" module, which will tell you how many words the text contains from frequency bands as determined by analyzing research corpora.

Again, in case of any insert error, here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYunlzgUiw&t=636s

Do not forget any of your comment is welcome!👂👂