Though exhilarating to many, President Obama's asserting that "we are all one" is a mammoth downer for most of American education.In terms of Keynesian economics ("depression economics," as Paul Klugman calls it) this means that government spending increases will go to industries (e.g., highway construction) linked to a maximum employment impact pyramid of direct and indirect suppliers.  Hence the coming double bind for American education of less money and higher expectations that include improving the "shovel-in-the-hand" productivity of our workforce, especially their mastery of our Graeco-Latinate high tech terminology. 

Practically considered, the most important technical terms in each field (medicine, engineering, etc.) are already available in print to learners, field by field, in our dictionaries, especially those which can be accessed online via dictionary.com.  Educators who want to improve the high tech literacy of their students and cut costs at the same time have good reason take dictionary-based learning — very much like a collection of Scripps National Spelling Bees focused upon employment-relevant fields (e.g., the health care industry).

Dictionaries as standard authorities.  An unabridged dictionary like the Random House Unabridged, with 315,000 entries and over a million headword-definition combinations represents the cumulative achievement of many years, going back to William Dwight Whitney's magnificent Century Dictionary (also available online).  This means that, as with the Scripps contest, the questions and their answers are available as a matter of permanent public record, not as a matter of year-to-year private whim (e.g., the SAT).

Here, by way of illustration, is a sample dictionary-based question:  Please spell the five-letter word whose entry lists its pronunciation as  /bel"ee/, its first listed part of speech as n. [for "noun"], and its seventh definition as
"Anat.[anatomy]the fleshy part of a muscle" (if this is a multiple-choice test please indicate your answer's first vowel letter) [the correct answer is BELLY, or "E"].  

As indicated, an unabridged dictionary like Random House can produce over a million questions in this Scripps format.  And their study difficulty, following George Kingsley Zipf and others, can be rated via a simple sum: number of letters (5) plus definition position (7), plus number of letters NOT appearing in the phonetic transcription (2, i.e., L and Y) equals 15.  As crossword puzzlers will agree, it's the low-frequency definitions that give us trouble, not just the number of letters.

A list of 200 occupation-relevant terms (e.g., carpentry), and student access to a full service dictionary and an average learning rate of 9 minutes per word-target will produce 30 hours of workplace-relevant memorization that can be thriftily tested.  Banal though these figures may come across to some, educators facing the cost-cutting/ productivity improvement double bind have good reason to take them seriously, especially when their jobs may be at stake.

High Speed Electronic Vocabulary Learning.  When it comes to cost cutting, the electronic version of a full service offers student access to much faster comprehensive learning.  The dictionary.com treatment of BELLY first offers the Random House Unabridged phonetic transcription and an audio version, along with 16 definitions and memory-friendly word-history information.  Since students have free access to dictionary.com, an educator can simply produce a Random House-based list and say in effect, "Go do it," with the assurance that the student will produce the same results as with a giant turn-the-pages unabridged dictionary, and a faster speed of six words a minute.

Even higher levels of learning efficiency can be achieved via personal computer with the WordGenius version of Random House Unabridged, which can provide lightening-fact click-access to entries and cross references.  For a target word like cardiovascular, this invites high-retention non-rote learning via guessing-style study question like: (1) which syllable in the target gets the strongest emphasis?  (2) what part of speech is first listed for it?  (3) how many definitions are listed for it?  (4) How many cross references are listed for it?  (5) if listed, what time did it enter the language? (6) if listed, what is the oldest etymological source listed for it? (7) what Early English cognate, if any, is listed for it, including its cross references?

Since the above study questions are optional, they open the door to a wide range of learning strategies, all with the goal of answering Scripps-style questions accurately.  As for learning speed, WordGenius and similar downloads support a claim of 4 word-definition combination per minute, this verifiable through personal-testing and comparisons.

List construction.  As has been indicated, the entry for a high tech term indicates its technical field in italics.  In an electronic dictionary this feature permits construction of a full coverage of anatomy terms (over a thousand).  And it also permits construction of mini-lists with various levels of learning difficulty:  14-letter single-definition terms, 8-letter single-definition terms, 8-letter terms with 4 definitions listed, etc.  To come right out with it, electronic dictionaries let educators shift nearly all the work, including list-based searching, to the students — and why not? since they are the one who will profit most from their personal high tech learning.

Transfer impact. . . . An electronic unabridged dictionary like WordGenius contains roughly 40,00 terms in almost 200 separate fields, ranging from anatomy to zoology.  Most of these are Graeco-Latinate, as is also true for at least 80% of the 315,000 headwords in such a dictionary.  What this means is that high tech learners master the basic structure of our Graeco-Latinate "language within a language," enough so that their mastery of a specific field invariably carries over other fields and to the overall vocabulary of what is now being called "Standard Worldwide American-Pronunciation English" (SWAPE, which is now official or quasi-official for over three billion residents on planet Earth, according to Times Almanac 2007).

From a career perspective, this means that a student demonstrating master of, say, 400 anatomy terms can expect to do much better on the vocabulary component of other career-relevant tests at various levels: middle school (the new SAT), high school (SAT and ACT), and college-based application for professional training (GRE, MCAT, LSAT, GMAT, etc.).

For educators in a Keynsian world of reduced budgets and higher public expectations, the direct hook up between dictionary-based high apeed electronic learning and subsequent performance on bread-and-butter entrance exams represents something of a psychological bonanza.  Simply put, a small amount of institutional assets shifted to dirt-cheap high tech literacy building will have a measurably high impact upon subsequent performance by that institution's students, be it middle school, high school, community college, or four year university.

Academic record keeping.  As all educators know, there are two kinds of students: flesh and blood students and arithmetical students who exist only on paper.  It is the flesh and blood students, of course, who register for courses, spend time in studying, take tests, earn letter grades, and receive diplomas.  But it is the arithmetical students who appear in an academic institution's records, usually as 15-unit "full time" students, with each ""unit" representing three hours a week of at least C-quality work for a 15-week semester, the degree that a B.A. arithmetical student represents — officially, at least — at least 5,400 hours of at least C-quality gwork????? in course of study that meet both college and major-field requirements.

As indicated by the above sketch, American education is still basically a time-on-task business.  The students, hares and tortoises, invest their time, take tests, earn credits, and receive diplomas.  Consequently, since vocabulary study is a time-on-task study whose transfer impact is demonstrably measurable and who direct instructional costs and demonstrably very, very low, American educators at every level take a good look at the use of electronic dictionaries as low cost, high speed, high performance learning productivity tools.

TO CONCLUDE.  The basic energy behind this pitch for dictionary-based high speed vocabulary learning can be summed up in the sentence, "Concentration trumps intelligence seven days a week."  It's a proposition which in my recent experience at least nine out of ten Americans, possibly influenced by Tiger Woods, will accept without debate.  It's also a democratizing proposition that opens the door, for our tortoises to compete against our hares, productively so for all concerned, especially American education as force for social and technological betterment.

I've always rooted for tortoises: in the fable and in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," where they're way below the clever alphas and betas, and identified as deltas.  Hence, somewhat adventitiously, the D.E.L.T.A acronym for my five key elements: Dictionaries as standard authorities; Electronic vocabulary learning; List construction; Transfer impact; and Academic record keeping.  Here's hoping, quite apart from educational cost cutting, what's here will be taken seriously as a step toward redemocratizing American education — at every level.

Published Janaury 20, 2009