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Finding Good Example Texts


AdamR

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I currently do some Greek tutoring with seminary students who use the Mounce text and workbook. Mounce's workbook provides excellent exercises for these students but, given that they've already done most of the exercises as homework, I'd love to find some other example texts I can use when working with these students.

 

I'm certain that Accordance can help me with this, but I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing this, so I thought I'd ask. Here's an example of what I'd love to be able to do.

 

The students have currently made it through Present Active and Middle/Passive and Aorist Active, Middle, and Passive participles (adverbial). I'd love to be able to find some texts from the LXX and Greek NT that use these participles (preferably only these participles) and (mostly) utilize the vocabulary that they've learned up to this point (or at least words occurring 50 or more times in the NT).

 

I recognize that some of the results are probably going to overlap with the Mounce selections, but I'm certain that there are some other good examples available that the students haven't seen before and would work well for tutoring.

 

Any ideas about how to go about something like this? I'd love to know if anyone is doing this already, too, especially with other concepts (genitive absolutes, for example, come to mind) as these students will be moving into Intermediate Greek this fall and I'd love to be able to find good examples of certain constructions for them to look at. (Would the syntax module be helpful for this? For example, if I wanted to find datives of time or something like that?)

 

Thanks for any help you can provide!

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I'm glad to see this type of question appear on the forums, for I've wanted for some time to write a series of blog posts demonstrating how Accordance can aid in authoring syntax exams.

 

First off, I would also mention that your students would benefit greatly by having passages from the Apostolic Fathers, Philo, and Josephus.

 

Here is what would I do first:

1. Define my corpora (i.e., what extant literature do you want to incorporate)

2. Run a search for your count criterion (i.e., use the [Count ?] command to populate your corpora with verses whose vocabulary has been covered. By the way, I would even include root searches in this list, so as to give the students the ability to work from their understanding of morphology, learning denominatives, diminutives, etc.)

3. Save the previous search for later searches, which can specify particularized morphological parameters (i.e., participles, so on). Make use of the HITS/CONTENTS searches as necessary.

 

Of course, you will have to proof results, so as to discern what verses would serve to be good pedagogical aids.

Edited by James Tucker
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So, at the risk of oversimplifiying James instructions, I ran this...

 

[HITS NA27-T]@[VERB (2aorist, present, aorist) (passive, active, middle) participle]

That gave me a list of 3307 hits. It doesn't delineate the adverbial uses however. I am not sure how to do that.

It doe strike me though, that the count is the count of the lexemes, not the roots. This may or may not be an issue for you depending on how you want to use it pedagogically.

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  • 11 months later...

I’m attempting to do something similar with Hebrew but am running into some problems.

 

I'm trying to produce more exercises for a Hebrew textbook. In order to do so I need to find texts with certain vocabulary in contiguous phrases and (hopefully) sentences. This is what I’ve been doing, using English examples,

 

Students only know "dog," "cat," and "run." So I would

1) search for these lemata (=dog <OR> =cat <OR> =run) in tab “1”.

2) then open a construct and search HITS 1 within 4 words HITS 1(larger or smaller number depending on how many the search yielded)

 

That search would give me possible exercises for that particular chapter.

3) Then I would add the following chapter's new words (HITS 1 <OR> =food <OR> =eat) and continue.

 

As you can image I have three tabs for each chapter (initial search, construct, linked tab to construct). I got to chapter 15 before Accordance crashed and will not allow me to open the saved workspace.

 

Some questions are: is there a more efficient and accurate way of doing this? Which tabs can I close? I'm sure I can close the construct and linked tab, but I'm still going to end up with over 30 tabs with searches that yield tens of thousands of results which may press Accordance (or my computer) too hard. Furthermore, closing some of the previous searches would remove their HITS from appearing, correct?

 

Any words of wisdom?

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