Monthly Archives: August 2025

Common One-Word Sentences in French, Revisited

Resources, , , , , , , ,

I’ve been playing with my scripts lately, filtering French. Previously I have published a list of the top one-word sentences in a corpus of French classic texts, as well as my lists of very easy extracts, based on the language repertoire covered by my Gnomeville comics. Today, while waiting for my very inefficient scripts to finish processing my old download of the French texts from Project Gutenberg, I revisited the frequent one-word sentences. I decided to keep the exclamation marks and question marks this time, so it is clear whether something is being used as a question or not. Here is what is coming up so far…

  1. Ah !
  2. Oh !
  3. Eh !
  4. Hélas !
  5. Oui.
  6. Non !
  7. Non.
  8. Oui !
  9. Comment !
  10. Quoi !
  11. Bah !
  12. <name>. (most likely names of characters in a play, the first one being Bonaparte.)
  13. Pourquoi ?
  14. Bon !
  15. etc. (probably an artifact of how things were processed)
  16. Allons !
  17. Ha !
  18. Tiens !
  19. Hé !
  20. Moi.

There’s quite a bit in common with the previous list of one-word sentences. The exclamations that showed in the previous list (Diable ! Parbleu !) still occur in the top 30, so there isn’t a lot of change despite the much larger corpus. I suspect further changes to be quite minor as the processed corpus grows.

The Book Flood Study

Research, , , , ,

In 1983, Elly and Mangubhai published their influential study that compared reading high interest stories to ordinary language instruction and found that there was considerable improvement in reading comprehension and other measures in the two reading-based groups compared to the language instruction group.

I’ve been reminded recently that the paper is behind a paywall, so I thought I would produce a few figures from it here and highlight some of the aspects of the study.

The study participants were primary school students in Fiji, who normally received instruction in their native Fijian for the first three years, switching to English in Class 4.

Here are the residual gains for each Class 4 group (300 students from 12 primary schools) and each type of assessment. The shared book group experienced the teacher reading aloud, sharing the story in an enlarged format, with students joining in to read easier sections, and doing story-related activities. The silent reading group read books of their own choice for 20-30 minutes a day. The control group did the normal curriculum (SPC/Tate audio-lingual program).

Another table showed that the gains a year later, continuing with the same reading activities, were even greater. The results were improved for exam marks in other subjects, including maths.