The textivate blog

The key thing to remember when making matching resources based on matching sentence halves is that the matches should be exclusive - i.e. you should make sure that there is only one sentence end that could possibly go with each sentence starter. It's no good making a resource based on the following data:

Je fais partie d'un club >> de foot
Je fais partie d'un club >> de tennis
Je fais partie d'un club >> de rugby
etc...

...because any of the ends can match perfectly well with any of the starters.

Instead, you need to do this sort of thing:

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Vocab resources with an output focus ask the question "how do you say ...?" rather than "what does ... mean?". 

The focus is on students' productive skills (speaking, writing) rather than on receptive skills (listening, reading), so they are more challenging for students.

The screen image above shows a textivate Match resource which has the following characteristics:

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You may or may not be aware that it IS possible to create Match resources on textivate matching images with text. This blog post tells you all about it.

Well, with text-to-speech, it's now possible to add a voice to those images too. Here's how:

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Add text-to-speech to your Match activities to create audio-based spelling activities where the meaning is reinforced by displaying the L1 as a prompt.

To do this:

1. Make a Match activity with the items listed as L1>L2
2. Add a TTS voice to the right match (L2)
3. Use one of the "Fill in the letters" Match activities, with TTS on.

See the embedded example below:

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A new feature added along with TTS (text-to-speech) was the ability to switch the order of matching items for many of the MATCH textivities.

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When you create a "matching" resource on textivate, it really does make a difference which side you put the target language...

TL = Target Language (the language being taught)
L1 = First language / mother tongue / the language of instruction.

Consider the activities generated by textivate when you create a resource based on 12 or more matching items (see image above). There are 32 (at the time of this blog post).

Let's go through them...

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Another resource blog, this time with a bit of tense revision for ÊTRE in various tenses (including with modals) in the first person (i.e. the "je" form).

Interactive exercises

Follow this link to open the above menu screen, with access to about 30 interactive exercises.

Worksheets

Scroll down for a few pdf worksheets (in no particular order). 

Note that you wouldn't expect students to do all of these (that would be daft!), but I've included all the possibilities so that you can see what is available.

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