Contextual vocabulary acquisition: from algorithm to curriculum

Abstract

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader's ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its "context", without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the "belief-revised integration" of the reader's prior knowledge with the reader's "internalization" of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. Running head: Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition Keywords:Artificial Intelligence, Education, Linguistics, Philosophy; Instruction, Language acquisition, Language understanding, Learning, Reasoning, Semantics; Knowledge representation, Logic, Symbolic computational modeling. 2 A Computational Theory of Contextual Vocabulary AcquisitionReaders often don't-or don't want to-look up unfamiliar words "in the dictionary". Sometimes, they don't realize that a word is unfamiliar, reading past it as if it weren't there: Even "skilled readers" skip "about one-third of the words" (Brysbaert et al. 2005), and words that are highly likely to be chosen in a cloze task are skipped more than others (Rayner & Well 1996); paradoxically, "children may misread or ignore unfamiliar words without jeopardizing comprehension" (Bowey & Muller 2005, citing Share 1999. Other times, readers realize that they don't understand a word but are too lazy (or embarrassed) to do anything about it: Perhaps-discouraged by previous, unsuccessful attempts to look words up-they hope that the word isn't important and won't be used again.Or they might be curious as to what the unfamiliar word might mean, i.e., what the author had in mind when using it. If no one is around to ask, or if the only people around don't know the word, then the reader can look it up in "the" dictionary. But what if no dictionary is handy? Or the only one doesn't contain the word? Or it does, but the definition seems inappropriate for the context, or is unhelpful? With the exception of learner's dictionaries designed primarily for ESL readers, dictionaries are often difficult to use and their definitions difficult to interpret (Miller 1985(Miller , 1986Miller & Gildea 1985;Rapaport & Kibby 2007).Alternatively, readers can "figure it out" from the "context". We call this "contextual vocabulary acquisition" (CVA). Just as giving a person a fish feeds them for a day, but teaching them to fish feeds them for a lifetime, so giving a reader a definition tells them one word's meaning, but teaching them CVA enables them to become better readers. We make four principal claims: (1) If "[t]exts ... are ... the soil in which word-meaning understandings are grown" (Wieland 2008), then the reader's prior knowledge is the water enabling that growth. (2) A procedure for successful CVA can be expressed in terms so precise that it can be programmed into a computer and (3) taught to h...