An increasing number of graded readers thus come out for pedagogical purposes. However, the reliability of text-grading for graded readers remains questionable. Whether they show linguistic difference across levels ne...An increasing number of graded readers thus come out for pedagogical purposes. However, the reliability of text-grading for graded readers remains questionable. Whether they show linguistic difference across levels needs further research given a shifted emphasis on multidimensional features. The study used Co-Metrix to give an assessment on graded readers’text-grading both under unidimensional and multidimensional indices, providing a testimony to publishers’original design and to the feasibility against the new trend. It indicated that across-grade difference only partly corresponded with publishers’text-grading rationale that focused on surface features. But it made no sense in linguistics at a deeper level since no overall difference was found. Therefore, the reassessment and design of graded readers were suggested to take account of multidimensional features for across-grade difference.展开更多
We study the short-term memory capacity of ancient readers of the original New Testament written in Greek, of its translations to Latin and to modern languages. To model it, we consider the number of words between any...We study the short-term memory capacity of ancient readers of the original New Testament written in Greek, of its translations to Latin and to modern languages. To model it, we consider the number of words between any two contiguous interpunctions I<sub>p</sub>, because this parameter can model how the human mind memorizes “chunks” of information. Since I<sub>P</sub> can be calculated for any alphabetical text, we can perform experiments—otherwise impossible— with ancient readers by studying the literary works they used to read. The “experiments” compare the I<sub>P</sub> of texts of a language/translation to those of another language/translation by measuring the minimum average probability of finding joint readers (those who can read both texts because of similar short-term memory capacity) and by defining an “overlap index”. We also define the population of universal readers, people who can read any New Testament text in any language. Future work is vast, with many research tracks, because alphabetical literatures are very large and allow many experiments, such as comparing authors, translations or even texts written by artificial intelligence tools.展开更多
文摘An increasing number of graded readers thus come out for pedagogical purposes. However, the reliability of text-grading for graded readers remains questionable. Whether they show linguistic difference across levels needs further research given a shifted emphasis on multidimensional features. The study used Co-Metrix to give an assessment on graded readers’text-grading both under unidimensional and multidimensional indices, providing a testimony to publishers’original design and to the feasibility against the new trend. It indicated that across-grade difference only partly corresponded with publishers’text-grading rationale that focused on surface features. But it made no sense in linguistics at a deeper level since no overall difference was found. Therefore, the reassessment and design of graded readers were suggested to take account of multidimensional features for across-grade difference.
文摘We study the short-term memory capacity of ancient readers of the original New Testament written in Greek, of its translations to Latin and to modern languages. To model it, we consider the number of words between any two contiguous interpunctions I<sub>p</sub>, because this parameter can model how the human mind memorizes “chunks” of information. Since I<sub>P</sub> can be calculated for any alphabetical text, we can perform experiments—otherwise impossible— with ancient readers by studying the literary works they used to read. The “experiments” compare the I<sub>P</sub> of texts of a language/translation to those of another language/translation by measuring the minimum average probability of finding joint readers (those who can read both texts because of similar short-term memory capacity) and by defining an “overlap index”. We also define the population of universal readers, people who can read any New Testament text in any language. Future work is vast, with many research tracks, because alphabetical literatures are very large and allow many experiments, such as comparing authors, translations or even texts written by artificial intelligence tools.
