Hat tip to Damian Fleming for a link to this fine post at Nieman Journalism Lab. The New York Times website includes a feature that allows people to look up words they don’t know while reading Times content.* Turns out the Times can and does track those clicks and generates lists of words readers most often have to look up. Cool! I immediately thought of the advice I’ve given my Latin students whenever they’ve asked about how to direct their vocabulary-building efforts: keep a list of the words you have to look up over and over, and memorize what’s on that list. The theory: Anything you catch yourself looking up over and over is likely to be a fairly high-frequency word and a mnemonic glitch, like that transition from phrase to phrase in music or choreography or verse or a script that you’re trying to learn by heart where you always stop and stare around blankly. It is, in other words, a high-payoff item on which to expend mnemonic energy.
The traditional method for tracking those frequently-looked-up words is to tick the margin next to a word in the dictionary each time you look it up. If you look up a word and find it already has two or three ticks, that word goes on your must-learn list. But imagine having students read from electronic texts, with Times-like lookup links to Lewis & Short or similar tools. A tool like that used on the NYT site would let students generate personalized must-learn vocabulary lists, and teachers could produce unit vocabulary quizzes keyed to what a particular class really needs to work on.
A more sophisticated extension of the technology would allow analysis of where in a sentence students are most likely to resort to the dictionary. In other words, a teacher would be able to see whether students are reaching (virtually) for the dictionary at a point where syntax fails them – in which case, the intervention that’s needed is not so much better control over vocabulary that students probably already know better than they think they do, but increased confidence in handling sentence-level syntax even in the absence of 100% control of vocabulary.
*I confess I was unaware of this feature of the NYT site, despite the fact that I read the Times online every day. I suspect I had seen those little floating question marks but had not clicked on them, on the assumption that hyperlinks on the Times website are a) useless, b) inserted by a computer or intern, either or both of which c) misunderstand the syntax and purpose of hyperlinks. Learned mistrust, in other words.
