• School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.903-922
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• 2016

This paper examined vocabulary in elementary mathematics textbooks and workbooks for the grade band of 3~4. This study focused on the adequacy of vocabulary using 9-degree of semantic difficulty. The results of this study showed that about three to eight percent of vocabulary with difficulty for students in grades 3~4 was employed. Whereas some difficult vocabularies were used along with the picture that helps students understand their meanings, others were presented without any illustrative tools. The most frequent vocabularies in the main activities of the mathematics textbooks included 'investigate', 'represent', 'number', 'how many', and 'method'. Based on these results, this study provides textbook writers with implications on what to further consider in dealing with vocabulary in instructional materials.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.329-350
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• 2017

This paper examined vocabulary used in elementary mathematics textbooks and workbooks for the grade band of 5~6. This study focused on the adequacy of vocabulary using 9-degree of semantic difficulty. The results of this study showed that most vocabulary in the textbooks and workbooks was adequate for the target grades. In some cases, however, vocabulary that was supposed to be difficult for the fifth and sixth graders was employed in a way that the meaning of such vocabulary was difficult for students to infer in the given context. The most frequent vocabularies in the main activities of the mathematics textbooks included 'method', 'investigate', 'number', 'communicate', and 'represent'. Based on these results, this study provides 5~6 grade textbook writers with implications on what to further consider in dealing with vocabulary in instructional materials.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.15A no.2
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• pp.125-134
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• 2008

We implemented a system being able to suggest example sentences for multiple choice tests, considering the level of students. To build the system, we designed an automatic method for sentence generation, which made it possible to control the difficulty degree of questions. For the proper evaluation in the multiple choice tests, proper size of question pools is required. To satisfy this requirement, a system which can generate various and numerous questions and their example sentences in a fast way should be used. In this paper, we designed an automatic generation method using a linguistic resource called WordNet. For the automatic generation, firstly, we extracted keywords from the existing sentences with the morphological analysis and candidate terms with similar meaning to the keywords in Korean WordNet space are suggested. When suggesting candidate terms, we transformed the existing Korean WordNet scheme into a new scheme to construct the concept similarity matrix. The similarity degree between concepts can be ranged from 0, representing synonyms relationships, to 9, representing non-connected relationships. By using the degree, we can control the difficulty degree of newly generated questions. We used two methods for evaluating semantic similarity between two concepts. The first one is considering only the distance between two concepts and the second one additionally considers positions of two concepts in the Korean Wordnet space. With these methods, we can build a system which can help the instructors generate new questions and their example sentences with various contents and difficulty degree from existing sentences more easily.