A simple How-to guide for making a variety of reading comprehension exercises on textivate.

1. Start by adding a text

Clear the text box on the textivate home page by clicking on the "New" icon. 

Then, in the "Text" box, type or paste in the text for your reading comprehension. e.g.:

2. Add questions and correct answers as Match data

Then click the "Match" tab and add matching items (in this case questions and answers) separated by ==, with each new pair on a separate line, as in the image below:

Read more »

The Multi Match activities or the MATCH side of Textivate (1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in 5, 1 in 10) and the Million activity (also on the MATCH side) have always presented the correct answer along with incorrect answers randomly selected from the rest of the answers for your resource.

BUT now you can specify your own incorrect answers! 

In the following way:

Simply add a vertical bar followed by hash |# after the correct answer, then as many incorrect answers as you like each separated by hash #

So you might end up with matching items that look something like this in your finished resource:

a house==une maison |#un appartment #une voiture
je fais ___ planche à voile==de la |#du #de l' #de #la #des
Que fait le garçon après le dîner?==il regarde la télé |#il écoute la radio #il prend le dîner #il se douche
Me ___ bailar==gusta |#quiero #gusto #quieren #gustan

(Now, clearly, it would be a pretty weird resource if all of the above appeared in the same resource...;-)

It doesn't matter how many "wrong" answers you include.

And you don't need to include them for every question. 

If you do include wrong answers, these will be used first (and any extra spaces will be used up with randomly selected answers from other questions in the resource).

You can use this feature along with a parallel text / audio / video to create reading or listening comprehension activities with a bit more of a challenge (i.e. where the answers are too obvious if they are randomly selected from the rest of the resource).

See this example of a listening resource created by adding wrong answers for most of the questions.

Thinking about it, you could even use this new feature to create multiple choice quizzes, grammar activities, all sorts.

(I think I'll be adding more to this later...)

Some Match activities have Random order / Original order options.

By default, these activities present the questions in random order.

But it can sometimes be useful to present the items in the original sequence, for example to make a "Find the French" activity simpler by having the questions appear in the same order as the vocab in the text, or to add comprehension questions to a resource which has a parallel text (reading comprehension) or audio or video (listening comprehension).

You can tweak your link urls -- add e1 to the activty url to make it start in the original order and no option to change. (See this blog post on tweaking your textivate urls.)

Here are a few examples:

French, multiple choice reading comprehension. (Questions follow the order of the text.)

French, reading comprehension, fill in the answers. (Word shapes provided. Again, follows the order of the text.)

Spanish, listening comprehension. Multi-choice.

Spanish listening comprehension, fill in the answers. (Initials provided.)

Remember, until this latest update, this sort of exercise would not have been possible on textivate as the questions would have appeared in random order.