WordBank Glossary
This table contains an alphabetical list of phrases found in or relating to WordBank.
Phrase | Description |
---|---|
Academic words | Words used more frequently in textbooks or other academic contexts and not as frequently in oral language or narratives. Academic words can be general or domain-specific. |
Bias | The extent (indicated by a value between -1 and 1) to which a word’s use is concentrated within a particular domain. There are four measures, one for each domain in the corpus (science, math, social studies, and reading/ELA). A bias value above zero means that a word occurs more in that particular domain than in other domains. A negative value indicates that the word appears less in that domain. All four bias measures will sum to zero because if a word occurs more in one domain, it must also occur less in one or more other domains. |
Dispersion | The extent (indicated by a value between 0 and 1) to which a word is spread across the textbooks that in the corpus. A value near 0 indicates the word occurs mostly in one textbook. A value near 1 indicates that the word is used across many textbooks within and across domains. |
Frequency | The expected number of specific word encounters a student will have (given a grade range and or a domain) based on text in the Corpus. |
Landscape of American School English Corpus | Comprised of over 40 million running words from 144 best-selling K-12 textbooks in science, math, social studies and reading/English language arts from 2011 to 2015. This corpus reflects words that K-12 students in the U.S. will encounter in their studies. Unlike most corpora in use today, it references materials intended primarily for students rather than adults. |
Lexile Word Measures | A Lexile word measure is an estimate of the challenge a particular word will present, on average, to a particular reader during independent reading. |
Running and Unique Words | “Unique words” can be contrasted with “running words” because while the same word may be repeated many times in a text, it counts as only one “unique” word with many “running” occurrences or repetitions. The technical terms type (unique word) and token (running word) are also often used. |