A New Kind Of Graded Reader

I found Tauber’s presentation on his approach to a graded reader very interesting. You can view a presentation like what he did at Bibletech 2008 here.

The basic idea of his approach is to break up a corpus into clauses, and introduce vocabulary, idioms, and morphological forms through these clauses and learn all this deductively, with generalized discussions after the forms have been learned seen thoroughly in actual text.

So there is a variation that I thought of that he has probably thought of as well, but I’ll mention it because I didn’t hear him do so. What would be nice is an algorithm that not only analyzed clauses to find good ones to use, but also found clumps of them so the students could read larger sections of text. There would be few in the beginning, but as time went on this would be a greater possibility.

At least concerning the ability to find clumps of text that would be appropriate given the students’ current vocabulary, progress in morphology, and idiom familiarity, I am sure this is something just about every Greek teacher has wanted. I know I certainly have.

I thought the presentation and approach was very interesting, and has some promise. And now that I hear that he has an accent I can go ahead and assume he is really smart, because all people with either Australian or British accents sound smart to me (And yes, Tim, this makes me think you are really smart as well). Is this true for anyone else?