Making Vocabulary Stick

John Gruber-Miller, Edwin R. and Mary E. Mason Professor of Languages, Cornell College

John Gruber-Miller delivers the talk Making Vocabulary Stick.

One of the greatest challenges facing students of Latin is acquiring a large enough vocabulary to be able to read texts that are matched to their level.  In Part 1, John reported on a study that he and Bret Mulligan did on vocabulary frequency and the readability of Latin texts.  They consider how common measures of lexical complexity (word length, word frequency, lexical sophistication, lexical density, and lexical variation) can inform instructors about what texts have the least (and most) lexical complexity. In Part 2, he offers concrete suggestions on how students can help expand their vocabulary knowledge and become better readers.

An expert on Classics pedagogy, John Gruber-Miller is the editor of the book When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin (Oxford University Press, the author of the online educational site, Ariadne: Resources for Athenaze, and the founding editor of Teaching Classical Languages, a peer-reviewed, online journal dedicated to Latin and Greek pedagogy. He has received the Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics at the College Level from the former American Philological Association (now Society for Classical Studies). His latest project is Imagining Ancient Corinth: An Introduction to Greek Literature and Culture, designed for intermediate Greek students.