The lineup also includes My Spanish Coach and My French Coach, available in November 2007. Each game makes learning a new language enjoyable and effortless!
Improving Your Expression Potential:
How Does It Work?
THE CORPUS + THE ASSESSMENT:
Over the years, linguists have built corpora, which are large, precisely structured sets of text. A corpus basically groups a sample of all the words used in "real life," either for a particular language as a whole, or for the language used in a specialized environment (such as academic discourse or news stories). Every vocabulary item in a corpus can be classified according to its usage frequency.
Research studies have shown that the most frequently used words in a general corpus are typically the first ones to be mastered.
The corpus used in the creation of My Word Coach is the largest corpus currently available, the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC). From this massive corpus, our linguistic consultants used computational tools to derive 20 more manageable lists of approximately 1,000 word families apiece, designated as "K-lists" in the game. These 20 carefully chosen lists can be considered representative of a complete, "educated vocabulary." For each K-list completed by a player, knowledge of at least 83% of the words in the list is considered technical "mastery" in the linguistic sense.
Over the years, linguists have created tests that can quickly and accurately provide an assessment of a person's K-list mastery, a metric also known as a "K-level." Using these linguistic tests as the benchmark, the game can easily assess each player's individual K-level.
Research has demonstrated that a person must encounter and, ideally, be required to retrieve a word from memory a minimum of five times before it is considered "mastered."
Additionally, research has proved that the more you are exposed to a word and spell it correctly, the less likely you will be to use the word erroneously in the future.
References:
Pimsleur et al in psychology
Mondria in L2
(Mondria, J.-A. & Mondria-De Vries, S.(1993). Efficiently memorizing words with the help of word cards and 'hand computer': Theory and applications. System 22, 47-57)
In My Word Coach, the "5-box rule" noted above will apply to any word encountered by the player so that:
Recognition and comprehension of the word is ensured.
Shades of meaning and representative contexts for the word are presented, leading to eventual "mastery."
In addition, the game will continually prioritize words that have not yet been mastered to ensure the player's success.
In the final stage of each level, a WORD REVIEW list will allow the player to reference misused or incorrectly defined words with their official definitions.
