The
Guided e-Learning
Sofa

I’ve just been revising some materials at level 2 – elementary – and I added a new multiple choice question into a web page reading activity. The new question is to be answered at the end of the exercise when students have already come to terms with the content and meaning of the main text itself, (which is about Yellowstone National Park in the USA). The question has to do with metatext and page layout, as well as with learner training as developed in subsequent activities.

This is the question I added, together with the answer items:

Question 10

Look at the text under the photograph.

You can see ‘key words: scenery, wildlife, geology, plants, ecology, hiking, fishing’.

Choose the best definition of the new expression key words.

Answer items:

Words which help you understand the important ideas in a text. [CORRECT]

Things you can do in the park. [INCORRECT]

Things you can’t do in the park. [INCORRECT]

As you can see, I deliberately break most canons of item writing here: it is very difficult for a student to choose either of the incorrect options- even though they bear on the text topic, they are evidently wrong answers. Their length is radically different from the correct option, setting them apart typographically. The content of one is related to the content of the other, but not to the content of the correct option- again, setting out two clear groups.

Why? As I said, it’s a deliberate strategy to elicit understanding, and to impart new information. By forcing students to choose the right answer – by spoon feeding them, my more severe critics will accuse – I hope to enable them to learn to recognise, and to start to interiorise, the new item. Of course, it will need to be recyscled later- but that’s another story.

I’m on holiday with my family at the moment, and we’ve just driven across the USA. We started out in New York and have ended up on the other side and at the bottom, in  LA. It was quite an experience, and quite a trip, and we came across all kinds of beauty, both natural and human. But, thinking back, I have to admit that what actually struck me most was a language fact: the apparent universality, in natural and informal speech, of the second person plural pronoun ‘you guys’:

You guys take care, right?

Are you guys ready to order?

Can we pick you guys up at 8?

I’ll call you guys tomorrow.

Didn’t they give it to one of you guys?

Is that OK for you guys?

Ten minutes of Google research over an extra breakfast coffee  (hardly a serious enquiry/inquiry, but this is a holiday after all)   tell me that in the 1950s H L Mencken had already found y’all (you all) to be very common, particularly in the South, but I don’t think I’ve heard that form even once- whereas youguys is everywhere. Because of the stress pattern, it probably even ought to be written without a space, as I just did, just like other compounds such as bookcase and raincoat.

My eleven year old twins (who are bilingual English/Italian) have happily adopted “you guys” as a long-desired upgrade to an English they had apparently always felt somehow defective when compared to the obvious distinction in Italian between tu (you singular) and voi (you plural). It just comes out naturally in their speech, though it sounds a mite odd in a Suffolk accent…

Using video is not the same as using audio. But in real life, for most of us and for most of the time, listening to something is most often also accompanied by visual clues and input in a way that video can capture in a way that just pure audio can never match.

So what balance should we strike between video and audio input? At the minute, it’s about half and half- but it’s not formalised in any way. I wonder whether it should be?

One of the aspects of our site that pleases me most is the listening work we provide. Because however much listening you do in class, it’s never enough. And because however colloboratively and imaginitely you set that class work up, when the chips are down, listening is fundamentally a solitary activity.
Listening activities in class can also often inhibit the shyer and the weaker of our students; to some extent at least, they withdraw from the learning process, and so inevitably do less than they need to.
Which is why self-study listening is so productive- as long as it’s monitored and corrected at point of delivery. Just how the best computer-assisted learning works!

I’ve just had to rewrite a part of a lesson in level 2, because of a complete change in the web page we linked to. Whenever this happens – and the pages are monitored to flag up a warning that it has happened- it can involve some imaginative writing to work round the problem: in this particular case, the original lesson used the British Prime Minister’s web site to practise some web skills, and in order to do the same work I had to look for authentic pages that are structured in a similar way to the changed original, and which relate to a similar topic area so as not to jar within the original lesson. Sometimes that’s easier than other times; in this case, the Canadian Prime Minister obliged, and so, whilst it was fiddly, there was no need for a major re-write.

Sometimes it’s not so easy, and whole swathes of the lesson must be recast: and sometimes I just can’t solve it, there are knock-on effects on other pages, and the whole lesson has to be re-written from scratch.

That’s the price we have to pay for using authentic material on a medium as dynamic as the web. But all our indications are that students appreciate it so much, and that it’s so pedagogically useful, that it’s worth it.

Let’s consider the humble cloze question for a minute: the web is full of them, primarily because it’s an easy sort of question to render by computer, as it has (or ought to have) a limited range of possible correct answers that can be accurately predicted and properly checked. Prime computer material, or so many think. Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s the thing: All of our clients are really busy at the moment. Too busy to call, too busy to train, too busy for anything, because rest assured, there’s a Italian/Spanish/French/German teenager/old man/young woman who is cheerfully causing stress for every DOS and Principal every EFL school out there.

Therefore, as summer is the busiest time to be involved in front-line EFL, it’s traditionally the time when we focus on developing our new applications and features for the coming year.  As a staunch traditonalist, this is exactly what I am working on right now, and here’s a sneak preview. Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this brief piece hides an ambiguity that I should deal with first: juxtaposing the two terms ‘reading exercises’ and ‘web’ gives rise to two distinct and differing question areas:
a) how can we put reading exercises on the web? Should we?
b) what are the similarities and differences between reading documents on the web and reading them on (for instance) paper? Should we develop specific forms of exercises which address any differences we find?

In this brief article I shall address only this second question. Read the rest of this entry »