Introduction
This paper analyzes the appropriateness of the text Live River (a short story consists of 1428 running words) for students who have mastered the most frequent 2000 words, but have not reached higher levels. Apart from that, modifications based on the data from “Vocabprofiler” are given in order to reach the 98% text coverage or more, so that students can get ideal comprehension. “Vocabprofiler” (Cobb, 2002), a software for lexical text analysis, classifies the words by their frequency bands. Meanwhile, you can also see the number of words that are likely to be unknown by students. It is used to analyze the text combining with the BNC/COCA-25 (Nation & Davies), a list derived from the original British National Corpus …show more content…
According to the data (Table 1), the cumulative coverage of tokens in K-1 word level is 88.73%, including 1267 tokens. The figure for cumulative coverage in K-2 word level is 93.21%. There are 64 tokens in this word level, which takes up 4.48% of total token amount. The “Off-List” consists of 9 types, accounting for 53 tokens. Among them, 6 types are proper nouns (Kenny, Archer, Robert, Amazon, rainforest and weekend). “Kenny”, “Archer”, “Robert” and “Amazon” are names, occurring 5,13,15 and 1 times respectively. The six words account for 3.57% tokens. Many researchers believe that proper nouns have a minimal learning burden and may be easily understood by readers (Webb & Nation, 2008). So, certain proportion of tokens in “Off-List” is taken into consider. The cumulative coverage of tokens is 96.78%, with a vocabulary of 2000 words plus proper nouns. That means 1382 words in the text are known by students who have mastered the most frequent 2000 words, and 46 words are likely to be …show more content…
Although, the figure indicates the comprehension of the text would not be difficult for students even without teacher’s help. However, even 100% text coverage may not cause complete comprehension to all the students. In order to make students get better understanding and acquire more incidental knowledge, the aim is to make the text reach 98% text coverage or more. As a result, the text needs to be modified to narrow the gap between students’ actual vocabulary size and the vocabulary size that is needed to reach 98% text coverage or