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What does the forestry text show us?

It shows us what a text looks like to learners with different amounts of lexical knowledge

The forestry text represents a topic that most people would not be particularly familiar with, but could probably read with comprehension if they knew the vocabulary content.

Nation (1990) used this text to let his reader experience what a text looks and feels like to a reader who knows 1000 word families, 2000 word families, and so on. In his book Vocabulary Teaching and Learning the forestry text was presented three times with three levels of known words.

You can use VP_Cloze to achieve this same effect. Put the forestry text into the box, and choose one of the three "post" levels from the menu. For example, choosing post_2k will show the 2k items as words and all the rest of the words (post 2k) as blanks. This is what the text looks and feels like to someone who knows only 2000 words.

Except, of course, that even unknown words contain known components, like word endings (-ed, -ing, etc). A future version of VP-Cloze will include this information on the clozed words.

Of course, no learner ever knows all the 1k words and none of the 2k, etc; they often show a mix of knowledge from several levels, especially if their language education has not included a vocabulary emphasis. For this reason, the menu offers choices like Random_70 and Random_90, to show what a text looks like to learners with a certain average percentage of word knowledge across levels.
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