We are encouraged by Cobb's (2022) description of changes to the Morpholex profiling tool (https://www.lextutor.ca/cgi-bin/morpho/lex/) resulting in more accurate word classifications. This addresses one point in our recent commentary on Morpholex and on Laufer and Cobb's (2020) study using Morpholex (McLean & Stoeckel, 2021). However, Cobb…

This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly…

Some words in English are derived words, i.e., words with an affix that changes their part of speech, like know "(v)" [right arrow] "knowable (adj)," or meaning, like "pleasant (adj)" [right arrow] "unpleasant (adj)." As a reading teacher, Tom Cobb had always believed that derived words were not particularly…

Graded readers are a great asset to learners acquiring the vocabulary of another language. Homonyms, on the other hand, are a recognized source of trouble for students with that same goal. Publishers of graded readers control the presentation of old and new words, but does this control extend to homonyms? Are only the word forms controlled for--in…

Several researchers have claimed that low-achieving students, especially second language students, need explicit academic vocabulary instruction to "catch up" with their age peers (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Two possible paths to vocabulary growth -- free reading and explicit vocabulary instruction -- were compared in terms of…

Studies of lexical coverage are valuable because they reveal the importance of vocabulary knowledge to comprehension. Lexical profiling research is also extremely useful because it indicates the vocabulary knowledge necessary to understand different text types such as novels, newspapers, academic lectures, television programs, and movies.…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

This study looks at how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the 1st 9,000 words of English for learning to occur. It uses corpora of various sizes and composition to see how many tokens of input would be needed to gain at least twelve repetitions and to meet most of the words at eight of the nine 1000 word family levels. Corpus sizes…

Texts are routinely simplified for language learners with authors relying on a variety of approaches and materials to assist them in making the texts more comprehensible. Readability measures are one such tool that authors can use when evaluating text comprehensibility. This study compares the Coh-Metrix Second Language (L2) Reading Index, a…

Making Nation's text analysis software accessible via the World Wide Web has opened up an exploration of how his learning principles can best be realized in practice. This paper discusses 3 representative episodes in the ongoing exploration. The first concerns an examination of the assumptions behind modeling what texts look like to learners with…

Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

Fourteen collections of children's reading materials were used to investigate the claim that collections of authentic texts with a common theme, or written by one author, afford readers with more repeated exposures to new words than unrelated materials. The collections, distinguished by relative thematic tightness, authorship (1 vs. 4 authors),…