Paragraph Exercise

I wrote this exercise because I wanted to give my students some in paragraphing. The idea was to produce an online version of the standard kind of exercise where students divide a piece of continuous text into different paragraphs. It’s pretty simple stuff – the user is told how many paragraphs there are and can make a paragraph by clicking at the end of a sentence. Choices can be changed and when the user is satisfied they can check their answers. They get overall feedback and can also get feedback about right or wrong choices at a click. They can continue the task until they are successful.

As this is an exercise type that is quite simple, but is also one I use quite a lot at certain times of the academic year, I am making an authoring tool for this which should be ready for beta testing at the beginning of march.

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A Hangman puzzle.

This puzzle was originally written to practice some adjectives used to describe personality. The puzzle provides gapped sentences which act as clues. The learner plays the hangman game to guess the missing word. The gapped sentences could easily be replaced by pictures or sound clips.

The code has been completely rewritten and simplified; the data and the javascript code have been separated so that a single page can make use of different data sets. The page uses php to facilitate this and also to set the level of difficulty – adjusting a value in the URL determines the number of guesses that the user is allowed.

HARD >> AVERAGE >> EASY >>

A Multiple Choice Cloze.

This puzzle was written to practice the multiple choice cloze type of exercise that is found in the FCE, CAE and CPE examinations. I particularly wanted to be able to display the question while at the same time being able to read the passage, something that is a little different in conventional cloze puzzles.

The code has been rewritten and simplified to avoid the use of pop-up windows. I plan to write an authoring tool in Java to produce exercises of this type.

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Dialogue Builder.

The user listens to an audio clip and then selects the response which they feel best continues the conversation. If they choose correctly they will be given the next audio clip to listen to and so on. This activity can be used either as a warmer to further work which expands on the particular functional area, or it can be used for revision.

JavaScript can be used to control audio clips being streamed by Real player. This page shows how it can all be done behind the scenes, keeping the appearance of the page simple.

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Phonemic Typewriter.

This is a utility I wrote to help me when I wanted to use phonetic symbols in documents I was typing. It is a simple keypad that allows you to type phonemic symbols that can then be pasted into a word processor. It can also be used to create code so that phonemic symbols can be used in a web page.

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And here is a version for transcribing US English.

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Phonemic Script Test – Text.

This is a simple exercise that asks the user to transcribe words into phonemic script. The user is given a text prompt.

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Phonemic Script Test – Audio.

Similar to the Text exercise above, except the user is given an audio prompt.

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Phonemic Hangman.

This is a familiar game – except that you have to ‘spell’ the word using phonemic symbols. Not as easy as regular hangman. (I have decide to use a simple countdown, rather than the traditional gallows which I don’t like.
The code has been updated so that it now modular – each different puzzle uses the same html and javascript – php is used to to link them to a specific dataset.

FAMILY >> JOBS >>

An Error Correction exercise.

This puzzle was written to practice the extra word type of exercise that is found in Paper 3 (English in Use) of the CAE examination. A similar approach could be used for the exercise type which focusses on spelling and punctuation.

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Collocation.

This puzzle aims to help with collocation. In the first stage of the exercise the learner chooses adjectives that collocate with a particular noun. This is then practiced further with some gapped sentences.

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A Hangman puzzle.

This puzzle was written to practice some adjectives used to describe personality. The puzzle provides gapped sentences which act as clues. The learner plays the hangman game to guess the missing word. The gapped sentences could easily be replaced by pictures or sound clips. This puzzle makes use of a script written by Jan Mulder – http://www.englishcafe.co.uk/

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A WordSearch puzzle.

This puzzle was written to practice words relating to crime. The puzzle has a list of definitions which act as clues, but these definitions could easily be replaced by pictures or sound clips. This puzzle makes use of code written by Cliff Leitch – http://www.twopaths.com/

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