Reading and Frequency Lists Prof. Miguel A. Arce Ramos English 213 PUCPR

Essential Questions What 3 strategies are used to decipher meaning? How does a person read? What is the difference between decoding and fluency? What is the importance of predicting as we read? What is vocabulary and what is its importance? How do we really learn what a word is? What are frequency lists and why are they important?

What are linguistics? Linguistics is the study of the human language.

What is reading? Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct and derive meaning. A person does three main things when reading: Decodes symbol Deciphers meaning uses background knowledge (schemata) to understand word.

How does a person read? Readers use a variety of strategies in order to decipher meaning such as: Phonetics Semantics Syntax

How does a person read? So your brain will unscramble three main things: Letters will be decoded and deciphered as visual patterns (words). Words are combined to make complete thoughts (sentences). Words will be successively recognized as phrases, paragraphs, etc.

How does a person read? Then, how do we read? However, once we learn how to read we stop reading letter by letter nor word by word.

Effective Readers In order to effectively read a person must read at a fast pace. A good reader will substitute a word that he/she does not understand for a word that makes sense in the sentence. A good reader will also reread when his/her pace is interrupted.

Effective Readers This is why we should preview and predict as we read. This will help us better understand text. Effective readers will also activate schemata in order to better understand a text.

Psychology of Reading Once we understand words, there is a process that goes on in our brains in order to comprehend: letters, words, meanings, memory from structure, prior knowledge, long term memory

What do teachers do to promote reading? Taking into consideration that the objective of any reading program is to make life-long readers. Teachers will: teach vocabulary words for the reading selection preview what will be read (activate schemata) will select high interest material read aloud for comprehension after data is silently read.

What will guarantee success when reading? Reading constantly Reading text with appropriate grammar (no grammar mistakes) Reading at an appropriate speeds No interruptions when reading Knowing and understanding high frequency words

What is vocabulary? Words in a language. So it will probably not surprise you to learn that vocabulary also includes lexical chunks, phrases of two or more words, such as Good morning and Nice to meet you, which research suggests children and adults learn as single lexical units. Phrases like these involve more than one word but have a clear, formulaic usage and make up a significant portion of spoken or written English language usage.

What is vocabulary? Vocabulary can be defined as the words of a language, including single items and phrases or chunks of several words which covey a particular meaning, the way individual words do. Vocabulary is central to English language teaching because without sufficient vocabulary students cannot understand others or express their own ideas.

What is vocabulary? Wilkins (1972) wrote that “. . . while without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed” The concept of a word can be defined in various ways, but three significant aspects teachers need to be aware of and focus on are form, meaning, and use. Spoken form Written form Word parts derived from the word

What are frequency lists? A frequency list is a sorted list of words with their frequency, where frequency here usually means the number of occurrences in a given texts.

Frequency Lists When it comes to word frequency, languages follow the Pareto principle. It’s been said that the top 1,000 most frequent words in the English language make up 85% of speech, and the top 5,000 make up 80% of writing. 

What are computational linguistics? Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.

Types of frequency lists There are different frequency lists: General Spoken Parts of Speech

Why are frequency lists important? We can optimize our study of vocabulary by focusing on learning the most common, useful words, the ones that we are likely to see and hear over and over again.  However, frequency lists are very important because they can help the learner understand words that occur often and can help in the comprehension of that specific language.

Why are frequency lists important? The more words you know, the better it is to communicate. In order to truly understand the meaning of a word, one must: Be able to decode it correctly. Know how to use it in spoken language. Understand it under different scenarios.