Assisted versus Unassisted Reading

Pedagogy and things related to education generally fascinate me. I love teaching. One of the related areas that holds a special place in my heart is second language acquisition. After all, I've spent a lot of my spare time studying Greek and Latin. I've been listening to podcasts, reading books, watching videos, and perusing blogs on second language acquisition for years. Now I'm going to be more structured (at some point, I need to discuss Obsidian, which has been at the center of all my note-taking for years) and purposeful about how I study language acquisition.

I'm going to start talking about something that I've learned or found interesting, starting with a video that I posted yesterday on Webb and Chang's study entitled Vocabulary Learning through Assisted and Unassisted Repeated Reading.

The big question, "Should you use audio when listening to foreign language materials?" is answered with a qualified but generally positive yes. But also, reading through the paper reminds me (not that I needed it) that we need more early and intermediate level-appropriate materials for Latin and (especially) Greek.

Classics Kit

Defining whether something is level-appropriate is impossible unless you know what somebody actually knows. This must be a difficulty for teachers who hold classes on special books or topics in Latin and Greek. I would imagine many of the people in these classes are people the teachers haven't seen before, and so would have no information on their background. But even if they did, "level-appropriate" would be hard to quantify.

This quantification is theoretically easy if someone uses app or website regularly as a part of their foreign language learning. Given their behavior, it should be relatively easy to have a good idea of what they know and suggest level-appropriate materials to them.

This is something I would even want to know for myself. If I had an app that knew the vocabulary and syntax that I knew and also had access to a large corpus of annotated texts, I could actually know this.

Also, and I noted this in the video, Legentibus provides a superb assisted reading experience. If you are a learner of Latin, do yourself a favor and go check it out right now.

I wonder how they pair up their audio with the text. Is it a manual process or something they have a tool to help them? Does a tool like that already exist? If it doesn't, it wouldn't be all that hard to build. I have it as a feature in my Linear backlog already, and will revisit again later.

That is likely it for this week. If you've got thoughts, please share them. Also, if you'd like to get updates on the reading I'm doing or updates to Classics Kit, please sign up for my mailing list.