Vocabulary Study

I'd like to be doing more with vocabulary. Here are some challenges, or untapped opportunities, I see in current practice:

• Assignments are rote, but they still take the teacher a long time to grade.
• Vocabulary acquisition is idiosyncratic, but vocabulary study is usually standardized.

I have been looking at Wordnet, a Princeton project to expose linguistic structures. For practical purposes, this will help me to automatically generate alternatives in multiple-choice tests which are not synonyms. Wordnet might also be an interesting tool for vocabulary study.

I'd like a system in which individual students can contribute words for the weekly lists, definitions are automatically provided, and the list is compiled. Students can contribute sample sentences, the teacher chooses the best sample sentences, and the system automatically generates multiple-choice tests. These can ask students to choose the best definition for a word, choose the sentence that best uses a word, choose the right word for a given definition, or choose the right word for a given sentence.

Or, if the test is to be administered on the computer, open-ended questions can be generated. Grading these will be easy, as the teacher will see all the responses to a particular question in a list. Using regular expression matching, once a teacher accepts a response, all similar responses are also accepted.