I received some excellent responses to my query on rare words and I would like to thank all the respondents.
Just to provide some context for those who are interested. My colleagues and I are working on a corpus of children's writing in which each script has been graded for writing quality. We want to find out if the use of rare words contributes to the grade awarded to each script. Previous research in this area has defined a rare word as any word that does not occur within the set of the first two thousand most frequent words. This definition does seem to discriminate between 'good' and 'poor' writing, though it is clearly problematic. We are trying to arrive at a clearer understanding of the issues surrounding word rarity.
Ngoni
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Dr Ngoni Chipere
Research Fellow
School of Education, University of Reading
Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading, RG6 1HY, UK
tel 0118 9875123 ext 4943
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