MultiLingProfiler, is a lexical profiling tool for French, German and Spanish, developed by NCELP in partnership with Prof. Laurence Anthony (Waseda University).
 
The tool ‘profiles’ texts to show the proportion of the 2,000 most frequent word families that are contained in them. This means that for any given text (such as a transcript for a listening activity or a reading text), it is very quick and easy to find out whether its words are within the 2,000 most frequent words in the language.
In addition, MultiLingProfiler profiles texts according to each week of the NCELP schemes of work. Teachers following the schemes of work can ascertain which words in a text have already been taught, at any given point in the school year.
Additional features of the tool include: 
  • you can adapt texts directly in the online interface and immediately see the effect of your edits on the % of high frequency words contained in the text;
  • it provides information about the lexical density of texts (how many ‘different’ words are used out of the ‘total’ number of individual words used);
  • you can retrieve the words that are deemed to belong to each ‘word family’ on the lists. 
 
NCELP will add profiling at the 5,000 word frequency level in the coming months. 
 
With further investment in the tool, it would be possible to adapt it so that it can check a text against other word lists. For example, a word list for a GCSE examination board could in theory be added so that texts could be checked for their compatibility with words on that list and then edited if necessary to make them more compatible with the word list. 

Demonstration of how to use MultiLingProfiler

Image of Lexical Profiling presentation
A demonstration of the tool by a practising teacher from the NCELP network was provided at the NCELP online conference.

 

Watch ‘Using MultiLingProfiler’