I often see people asking questions on Twitter or in Facebook groups about what tools are available to create "sentence scramble" or "unjumble the words" activities, and of course I tell anyone interested that you can do that, among many many other things, on Textivate.com

So let's have a quick look at the "sentence scramble" options available from one Text+Match resource (this one):

Match Jumble

As users of Textivate will know, you can create resources in Textivate based on a text, on matching items, or on both. Here we'll look at matching items. The items in this case are short phrases that are taken from the text itself.

L1 prompt appears (in this case English), and students have to click the L2 words (in this case French) in the correct order to rebuild the phrase.

This repeats until all of the matching items have been completed.

1. Try this activity >>> Match with English prompt only

With just the L1 prompt as a clue (as in the link above) the activity is a translation activity, with students translating the L1 prompt into French.

If you enable text-to-speech (TTS), however, it also becomes a dictation activity. And because the L1 is also there, it's actually dictation + translation combined, as in the link below:

2. Try this activity >>> Match with English prompt + French audio (TTS)

We can also add the text from which the matching items were taken, but as a parallel text:

As you can see in the above image, the activity is essentially the same as in the first image, but students have recourse to the original L2 text and can look through this text to find the L2 sentence if they can't work it out by themselves. See the link below:

3. Try this activity >>> Match with English prompt + parallel French text

And obviously we could add the TTS audio too, so students can read L1 prompt, look at the mixed up L2 words, have reference to the L2 text AND hear the L2 audio, as in the link below:

4. Try this activity >>> Match with English prompt + parallel French + French audio (TTS)

Text Jumble

In the TEXT activity menu there is another Jumble activity option, which breaks the original text down into sentences and requires students to rebuild the text, one sentence at a time, by putting the words of that sentence back into the correct order.

The activity continues until the text is fully reconstructed.

5. Try this activity >>> Text rebuild only

As with the Match activities, we also have the option of adding TTS audio, which effectively turns the activity into a dictation-like activity:

6. Try this activity >>> Text rebuild + French audio (TTS)

We can also add a translation of our main text as a parallel text, as in the image below:

Here the students have reference to an L1 prompt for the whole text. This helps make the meaning clear to students, so that they know what the sentences that they are building are supposed to say. It effectively turns it into a scaffolded translation activity.

7. Try this activity >>> Text rebuild + parallel English text

And we can add the TTS audio too, so that as well as having reference to the L1 text (translation), we also have each sentence read out by TTS (dictation), converting the whole activity into a combined translation + dictation activity, as in the link below:

8. Try this activity >>> Text rebuild + French audio (TTS) + parallel English text

All of the above "sentence scramble" options come from 1 resource. And if you follow the link below you'll see the activity menu for that resource, with the parallel text visible. Note that many of the activities listed have parameters that can be set on each activity page to change the nature of the activity in the same way as I have demonstrated above. 

Here's the link >>> Activity menu + parallel text

I hope you find this useful :o)