Learn English Vocabulary and Writing

Learn English Vocabulary and Writing Use Software to Prepare for the SAT or GRE Exams Manu Konchady Mustru Publishing, Oakton, Virginia Learn English Vocabulary and Writing: Use Software to Prepare for the SAT or GRE Exams by Manu Konchady Mustru Publishing, 3112 Bradford Wood Court, Oakton, VA 22124 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review Copyright © 2009 by Manu Konchady First Edition, ISBN: 978-0-557-12557-9 Printed in the United States of America The author has taken every precaution to verify the contents of the book,but assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions in the book and any damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein All brand names and product names mentioned in this book are trademarks or service marks of their respective companies Any omission or misuse (of any kind) of services or trademarks should not be regarded as intent to infringe on property of others The author recognizes and respects all marks used by companies, manufacturers, and developers as a means to distinguish their products Contents Preface Introduction 1.1 Computer Assisted Language Learning 1.2 Quizzes 1.2.1 Should you Guess an Answer? 1.3 Software 1.3.1 WordNet 1.3.2 Text Sources 1.3.3 Audio 1.3.4 Emustru v Learning Vocabulary 2.1 Why Learn Words? 2.2 Which Words are Important? 2.2.1 How many Words should you Learn? 2.2.2 Do you know a word? 2.2.3 Can you guess the meaning of a word? 2.2.4 Five Ways to Grow your Vocabulary 2.3 How to Learn with Online Quizzes 2.3.1 Visual Thesaurus 2.3.2 Free Rice 2.3.3 Quizlet 2.3.4 Emustru 11 11 12 13 21 21 23 24 25 30 31 34 35 37 38 39 i 2.4 Why should you learn Spelling? 2.4.1 Spelling Error Analysis 2.4.2 Emustru Spelling Quiz 2.5 Words, Meanings, and Relationships 2.6 Word Games 2.6.1 Emustru 2.7 Web Sites to Learn Vocabulary and Spelling 42 42 45 48 50 50 54 Learning Sentence Construction 3.1 Building Sentences 3.1.1 Five tips to build sentences 3.1.2 Punctuation 3.1.3 Are long sentences necessary? 3.1.4 Do the use of synonyms improve sentences? 3.1.5 Is the sentence precise? 3.2 Is it grammatically correct? 3.2.1 How does a grammar checker work? 3.2.2 E-rater Grammar Checker 3.3 Emustru Sentence Quizzes 3.3.1 Cloze Test 3.3.2 Find the Error 3.3.3 Correct the Sentence 3.4 Web sites to learn sentence construction 57 58 58 61 62 63 64 64 66 70 73 74 77 79 80 Automatic Essay Scoring 4.1 How does it Work? 4.1.1 Traits and Features 4.1.2 Creating an Essay Model for an AES 4.1.3 Using a Model to Assign a Score 4.2 Applying AES 4.2.1 Is AES Valid? 81 83 84 87 89 89 90 ii 4.2.2 Essay Prompt 4.2.3 Essay Length 4.3 How you write an essay for E-rater? 4.3.1 Grammar 4.3.2 Usage 4.3.3 Mechanics 4.3.4 Style 4.3.5 Organization and Development 4.3.6 Lexical Complexity 4.3.7 Prompt-Specific Vocabulary Usage 4.3.8 E-rater Writing Tips 4.4 Emustru Essay Evaluator 4.5 Web sites to learn Essay Writing 91 93 94 95 97 99 103 107 110 113 115 118 123 Other Topics 5.1 Listening 5.2 Speaking 5.3 Comprehension 5.3.1 Requirements 5.3.2 Tips 5.4 Web sites to practice Reading Comprehension 125 125 127 128 129 130 133 Appendix A Installing Emustru 135 Appendix B Parts of Speech 145 Appendix C Word Lists 153 Index 155 iii iv Preface Most books for exams like the SAT describe sample questions, methods to answer questions, and a few practice exams These types of books are very helpful to learn about an exam, the format, the schedule, and the level of difficulty However, practice exams have little value after the first or second attempt The questions and answers are familiar and you can identify the answer from memory This book also emphasizes practice exams, however, questions are customized to your skill level The software included with this book tracks your performance on previous exams before creating a new custom quiz Questions are dynamically generated when you are ready to take your exam The use of dynamic quizzes means that you cannot rely on memory to answer questions The only time a question is repeated is if you missed a question or if the software requires you answer the same question correctly more than once On the downside, automatically generated questions are not as precise as manually generated questions A compiled question is carefully produced; the description of the question and the set of answers are chosen based on some pattern and verified The software to automatically generate questions, attempts to mimic the same process An essay writing section is part of the current SAT and GRE exams The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the developers v of the SAT and GRE exams, uses machine and human graders to evaluate essays An automated essay evaluator is included with the accompanying software You can also learn how Erater ®, the essay evaluator from ETS, will score your essay Audience This book and the accompanying software is for anyone planning on taking a standardized test or simply interested in using software to learn English If you plan on using the software, you will need some basic knowledge of a PC (either on a Windows or Linux platform) The author will provide technical support to install and run the software Organization The first chapter begins with a description of some of the software that you can use to learn a language Most of the software explained in the book is open source (with the exception of Erater) and can be downloaded from the Web The second chapter includes a collection of tools to learn spelling, vocabulary, and word relationships Methods to improve your vocabulary and guess the meaning of unknown words are also mentioned The third chapter mentions a few tips to build sentences and explains how an automatic grammar checker works Three different types of sentence quizzes are described In the first quiz, you need to find the missing word(s) from a given set of words In the second quiz, an error may or may not be present in a sentence; you have to spot the error or leave the sentence asis The third quiz substitutes an underlined sentence fragment vi with a possible correction; here you have to identify the sentence fragment that is the most appropriate and grammatically correct The fourth chapter explains how automated essay evaluation works The accompanying software includes an essay evaluator that you can use to evaluate your essays Many tips to write an essay for the E-rater essay evaluator are mentioned You can write and organize your essay such that E-rater will be more likely to assign a high score The final chapter includes some topics (listening, speaking, and comprehension) that are not covered in detail in this book, but are part of standardized tests Finally, the appendices include an installation guide for the accompanying software, a brief guide to punctuation, and a collection of links to lists of SAT words, misspelled words, and words ordered by a frequency index Conventions The following typographical conventions are used in the book Constant Width: Indicates file names, variable names, classes, objects, command line statements, and any other code fragment Constant Width Bold Indicates an URL or email address Italics: Indicates proper names such as the names of persons, books, titles, or quoted sentence fragments vii Support Visit http://emustru.sf.net to download the code used in this book The sample code is written in PhP and Java Please report bugs, errors, and questions to mkonchady@yahoo.com Bugs in the code will be corrected and posted in a new version of the sample code Your feedback is valuable and will be incorporated into subsequent versions of the book Please contact the author, if you would like more information on some topics that have not been covered or explained in sufficient detail I have attempted to make the contents of the book comprehensible and correct Any errors or omissions in the book are mine alone Acknowledgements First I would like to thank the developers of the open source tools including – Lucene (a search engine API), LingPipe (a collection of linguistic tools), WordNet (a thesaurus / dictionary), MySQL (a database), FreeTTS (a speech synthesizer), and several other tools These open source tools have made it possible to develop the accompanying open source “Emustru” software to learn English and practice for standardized tests The development of Emustru was partially funded by Sarai.net, India and Cetril, France Emustru received the third place award (Education Category) in the free software competition held by the Trophées du Libre in June 2009 The list of roots, prefixes, and suffixes for words is included with the permission of Jessica DeForest The list of common misspelled words includes the list from Wikipedia viii is replaced with “It’s” Other popular contractions include haven’t, couldn’t, and you’re Comma The comma, like the apostrophe, can function in more than one way A comma organizes words in a sentence into groups of words, separates items in a list, and indicates a pause in a sentence (see Figure B.3) The commas in the sentence, “The primary colors are red, blue, and yellow.”, separate the three primary colors The second comma following blue is optional, but its inclusion can make a sentence more readable The following four sentences illustrate other usages of the comma , I knew that the price of gold would increase but I had no idea that the price would skyrocket , I first checked if the power supply was defective and then I disassembled the computer , Although she is a good student Jane barely passed Calculus Mr Johnson, who is the head of development will present the awards at our annual dinner , Notice, in the first two sentences a comma followed by a conjunction separates two complete sentences The sentences on either side of the conjunction are complete and could be separated with a period instead of a conjunction and a comma A longer sentence may be preferred over two short sentences, when there is some relationship between the two sentences The introduction in the third sentence prefaces the second part of the sentence In the last sentence, the two commas are positions in the sentence where the reader should pause to interpret the meaning of the sentence 149 B Parts of Speech Semi-colon and Colon The semi-colon and colon punctuation characters are sentence separators A semi-colon separates a sentence into two parts - the first part explains part of a story and the second part completes the remainder A period between these two sentences would introduce a stronger separator than necessary, while a comma would not be sufficient (see Figure B.4) Figure B.4.: Punctuation Characters that Indicate Pauses in a Sentence Punctuation Character ? ! Pause Time : ; , He did not spend any time studying even though he was far behind in his class he was going to fail his math test ; The use of the colon to separate two sentences is similar to the use of the semi-colon, with the following difference The text before the colon introduces part of a sentence that is elaborated, restated, or explained in the following part of the sentence Sherlock Holmes was left with one question unanswered Why did the thief leave his keys behind? : 150 In general, the semi-colon is used more often than the colon to indicate a pause It may be difficult to define the precise length of a pause in a sentence and lookup the appropriate punctuation character, based on the duration of the pause, for a given sentence 151 B Parts of Speech 152 C Word Lists The PDF files below can be downloaded from http://emustru.sf.net • http://emustru.sf.net/list_roots.pdf – List of Prefixes, Suffixes, and Roots: This list contains some of the common roots, prefixes, and suffixes that make up the building blocks of numerous English words Each root, prefix, and suffix has the associated meaning and sample words • http://emustru.sf.net/list_confused_words.pdf – List of Sentences for Confused Words: Words such as accept and except are sometimes used incorrectly in sentences This list includes a set of sample sentences for every pair of confused words • http://emustru.sf.net/list_misspelled_words.pdf – List of Misspelled Words: A collection of 2700 words that have been frequently misspelled • http://emustru.sf.net/list_preposition_errors.pdf – List of Preposition Errors: A short list of common preposition errors • http://emustru.sf.net/list_sat_words.pdf – List of SAT Words: A list of 8600 words that appear often 153 C Word Lists in the SAT exam Each word is hyperlinked to a WordNet definition • http://emustru.sf.net/list_words_sfi.pdf – List of 10K Words from Brown Corpus: A list of ten thousand words and their associated standard frequency index values from the Brown Corpus 154 Index AES, see automated essay scoring argumentative prompt, 92 audio recording, 35 automated essay scoring, 81 automatic speech recognition, 127 average word length, 110 bigram, 72, 96 Brown corpus, 40, 69 building sentences, 58 CLAWS, 69 Cloze test, 14, 74 College Board, 112 Computer Assisted Language Learning, confused words, 97 context, 30 coordinating conjunctions, 106 cosine similarity measure, 114 cue word, 109 discourse classifier, 107 element, 86 marker, 75 words, 59 E-rater, 16, 82, 93, 94, 96 edit distance, 42 Educational Testing Service, 16, 68, 81, 132 Emustru, 13, 15, 40 essay evaluator, 118 sentence quizzes, 73 spelling quiz, 45 Espeak, 125 essay content, 122 evaluation, 15 length, 93 model, 87 writing, 16 ETS, see Educational Testing Service descriptive prompt, 92 155 Index example sentences, 60 expository prompt, 92 extracting sentences, 115 faulty comparison, 99 feature, 84 filter, 72 formal writing, 116 Free Rice, 6, 10, 37 FreeTTS, 13 function words, 63 grammar checker, 15, 64, 66, 96 ALEK, 68 E-rater, 70 LanguageTool, 67 parse tree-based method, 67 rule-based method, 67 grammar errors, 85, 95 great sentences, 57 LAMP, 135 letter errors, 100 Lewis, Norman, 5, 21 lexical complexity, 86, 110 listening, 125 logistic classifier, 88 long sentences, 62 machine grader, 63 main point, 109 mechanics, 99 New York Times, 12, 32, 34 O’Connor, Johnson, 22 hangman, 50 holistic score, 83 human grader, 16, 63, 81, 83, 87, 90, 94, 100 hyponym, 49 part of speech, 31 passage comprehension, 128 passive sentences, 105 personal opinions, 130 phrase game, 52 precise sentence, 64 preposition error, 99 Project Gutenberg, 11, 32, 125 pronunciation, 2, proxes, 84 punctuation, 61, 65 punctuation errors, 101 Intelligent Essay Assessor, 90 Intellimetric, 90 quiz, 5, 21 Quizlet, 10, 38 Krugman, Paul, 12 sentence 156 Index completion, 75, 77 length, 62, 106 pattern, 59 structure, 71 SFI, see standard frequency index similarity computation, 114 speaking, 127 speed reading, 131 spell check, 42, 64 spelling, 42 error, 16, 43, 86, 100, 120 error analysis, 42 quiz, 13, 35, 37 Sphinx project, 127 standard frequency index, 111 style, 103 subject-verb agreement, 72 test writer, 26, 34, 48, 129 text to speech, thesis statement, 109 trait, 84 trin, 84 WAMP, 135 Washington Post, 12, 32 Wikipedia, 43 word, 24, 27 errors, 101 form, 24 games, 50 jumbles, 33 lists, meaning, 30, 48, 49 prefix, 28 relationships, 33, 53 roots, 28 suffix, 28 wrong form, 98 WordNet, 2, 11, 13, 26, 35, 48 words inappropriate, 104 repetitive, 103 United Nations World Food Program, 37 vector, 87, 115 Visual Thesaurus, 35, 36 vocabulary, 25 157 Index 158 Bibliography [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_ language_learning, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) [2] http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/freestuff.htm, Free resources and articles on Computer Assisted Language Learning [3] http://wordnet.princeton.edu, The WordNet lexical database for English [4] http://ftp.ets.org/pub/res/erater_iaai03_burst ein.pdf, Criterion: Online essay evaluation: An application for automated evaluation of student essays [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus, Brown Corpus The [6] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, Project Gutenberg The [7] http://www.quizlet.com, Quizlet: Flashcards, vocabulary memorization, and word games [8] http://www.alias-i.com, The LingPipe Computational Linguistics software 159 Bibliography [9] E B Page and N.S Petersen: The computer move into essay grading Upgrading the ancient test Phi Delta Kappa, 76(7), 561-565 [10] J Burstein, The E-rater Scoring Engine: Automated essay scoring with natural language processing, in Automated Essay Scoring: A Cross Disciplinary Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003, pp 113-121 [11] Y Attali and J Burstein: Automated Essay Scoring With e-rater® V.2, The Journal of Techonology Learning and Assessment, Vol 4, No 3, February 2006 [12] http://www.vantagelearning.com/school/products /intellimetric/, Intellimetric, Vantage Learning [13] http://www.knowledge-technologies.com/prodIEA shtml, Intelligent Essay Assessor, Prentice Hall [14] C E Good, A Grammar Book for You and I (Oops, Me): All the Grammar You Need to Succeed in Life, Capital Books, Sterling, VA, March, 2002 [15] M Strumpf and A Douglas: The Grammar Bible: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Grammar but Didn’t Know Whom to Ask, Holt Paperbacks, New York, NY, July, 2004 [16] http://freetts.sf.net, The FreeTTS text to speech synthesizer written in Java [17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test, The Cloze test or assessment with certain words removed from text 160 Bibliography [18] http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence4.html, The Link Parser from Carnegie Mellon University [19] http://www.languagetool.org, The LanguageTool Open Source Language Checker from Daniel Naber [20] C Leacock and M Chodorow: Automated Grammatical Error Detection, in Automated Essay Scoring: A Cross Disciplinary Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003, pp 113-121 [21] L Truss: Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Profile Books, May 2007 [23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT, The SAT Reasoning Test administered by the Educational Testing Service [24] J Burstein: The E-rater Scoring Engine: Automated essay scoring with natural language processing, in Automated Essay Scoring: A Cross Disciplinary Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003, pp 113-121 [25] Y Attali and J Burstein: Automated Essay Scoring With e-rater® V.2, The Journal of Techonology Learning and Assessment, Vol 4, No 3, February 2006 [26] http://www.vantagelearning.com/school/products/ intellimetric, Intellimetric, Vantage Learning [27] J Burstein, M Chodrow, C Leacock: Criterion Online Essay Evaluation: An application for automated evaluation of student essays, Proceedings of the Fifteenth An- 161 Bibliography nual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2003 [28] J Burstein, M Chodrow, C Leacock: Automated Essay Evaluation: The Criterion Online Writing Service, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2004 [29] J Burstein, D Marcu, K Knight: Finding the WRITE stuff: Automatic Identification of Discourse Structure in Student Essays, IEEE Intelligent Systems, January 2003 [30] http://www.scribd.com/doc/4018042: Handbook for English Language Learners Writer’s [31] http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/r3.pdf : The Ups and Downs of Preposition Error Detection in ESL Writing, ETS, Princeton, NJ 2008 [32] A Longknife and K.D Sullivan: The Art of Styling Sentences, Barron’s Educational Series, New York, 2002 [33] R McCutcheon and J Schaffer: Increase Your Score in Minutes a Day SAT Essay, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2004 [34] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity: Cosine similarity measure [35] H M Breland et al.: The College Board Vocabulary Study College Board Report No 94-4, College Board Publications, New York, 1994 [36] http://espeak.sourceforge.net: Espeak, an Open Source Speech Synthesizer for English 162 [...]... pronunciation, vocabulary, and comprehension Reading is similarly evaluated, except that a student must know the alphabet and spellings of words Most students learn a vocabulary of several thousand words in a language before acquiring a level of knowledge sufficient to pass competitive exams Learning vocabulary is a fairly routine task and a computer is well-suited to make this task interactive and more... to a student Two popular sites on the Web to learn vocabulary are Quizlet and FreeRice (see Section 2.7 ) Learning the grammar of a language is more challenging than learning new words English has many rules and exceptions that can only be learnt through practice A grammar checker examines the text of a document, one sentence at a time and returns errors and suggestions for corrections Most popular... affordable than 30 years ago The use of multimedia and games have made the learning process more pleasant and engaging for the student 1.1 Computer Assisted Language Learning Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is a personalized approach to learn a language The two primary features of CALL [1] are student-based or individualized learning and interactive learning In a student-based lesson, the material... Introduction Current language exams evaluate not only vocabulary, grammar, and writing skills, but also listening and speaking abilities Exams like the SAT reasoning test and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) do appear challenging at first They require a fairly large vocabulary, knowledge of some grammar rules, and decent writing skills Memorizing word lists and a list of grammar rules is tedious Can a computer... spoke Similarly, the past tense of fly is flew and teach is taught These inconsistencies and a host of other grammatical issues make English a fairly difficult language to learn However, it is still important to learn the rules of grammar and spelling in addition to the list of exceptions There are a number of good books [14, 15] to learn grammar and vocabulary This book does not repeat the same material;... effort to learn new words So, even if you are learning words for a competitive exam, you will find that a larger vocabulary will lead to success in other areas as well Learning vocabulary is also not a very difficult task that needs a high IQ Anyone, can learn a few words at a time and 22 2.2 Which Words are Important? quickly build a large vocabulary Although, it is relatively easy to read and study... prepare for these types of exams? Yes There are many programs on the Web to learn word lists, grammar, evaluate writing, and convert text to speech English is a moderately difficult language to learn for several reasons One, estimates of the number of words in the English language is large and continues to grow The Oxford English Dictionary contains about 170,000 words while the computer-based WordNet... evaluated, and customized without subscription fees or license requirements You can learn vocabulary, check grammar, evaluate writing, and correct spelling with the collection of software packages (see Appendix A) included with this book If you are interested, you can tinker with the software, improve it, make suggestions, add documentation, and test the code for bugs There are many sites [2] on the Web to learn. .. the Web to learn English vocabulary, grammar, writing, and reading At the end of each chapter, a list of relevant Web sites that include practice tests are mentioned The main skills a student of any new language would need to prepare for an exam include Listening: A student listens to an audio passage and answers questions to evaluate comprehension Writing: An essay prompt is provided and a student writes... for standardized English exams with the help of quizzes and other tools Most of the software described in the book does not need an Internet connection The idea of using a computer to make learning more interesting is not new Computer based learning on a PC has been in existence since the 1980s Current PCs have more than adequate memory and power to store large dictionaries, retrieve information, and ... to learn word lists, grammar, evaluate writing, and convert text to speech English is a moderately difficult language to learn for several reasons One, estimates of the number of words in the English. .. it, make suggestions, add documentation, and test the code for bugs There are many sites [2] on the Web to learn English vocabulary, grammar, writing, and reading At the end of each chapter, a... pronunciation, vocabulary, and comprehension Reading is similarly evaluated, except that a student must know the alphabet and spellings of words Most students learn a vocabulary of several thousand words