Luxfield Text Grading and Editing Services
CADET: vocabulary monitoring basics
Luxfield Editing makes use of a specially developed software package called CADET. This provides help with three main editing tasks -- vocabulary monitoring (this section), usage monitoring, and readability --text complexity-- checking.
Vocabulary monitoring:
the software compares all the word forms in one file with all the word forms in another, and reports on any word forms that occur in the first but not in the second.
This has proved useful in the following ways:
- If the first file is a text and the second file is a syllabus word-list, editors can see if any 'out-of-syllabus' vocabulary occurs in the first. The vocabulary of any text written to any syllabus can be checked quickly and easily this way.
- If the second file contains nothing at all, all the different word forms used in the first will be reported. In this way a complete vocabulary list can be created -- useful for glossary development and checking, or, possibly, for indexing.
- If no syllabus lists are available for a course but a steady input of new vocabulary is required at each level or grade, the vocabulary of higher-level texts can be compared with the vocabulary of lower-level texts. This way a complete list can be made of the vocabulary used throughout a course. From such a list it is possible to see the rate at which new vocabulary is introduced, how much reinforcement and 'revisiting' there is, how much the student user is challenged at different stages of the course, and so on.