Sessions

Three Lingolab sites for engaging phrase-level practice

In this presentation there will be interactive demonstrations of the set of free LingoLab web apps, which were developed by the presenter and Tokyo-based programmer/teacher Paul Raine. Attendees of this session can expect to learn how they can use these sites to provide their students with phrase-level practice as homework, as an in-class quiz game, and as a one-time assessment. The LingoLab activity itself involves learners being shown a prompt which can be a combination of text, audio and picture. The learners respond by choosing target words in the correct order to form the target sentence. While this format may look similar to the standard ‘scrambled sentence’ or ‘narabikae’ activity, the LingoLab design offers a lot of flexibility with prompt types (especially as regards audio) and has some unique features which add value to the learning interaction. One such feature is that learners get immediate prompts about errors made while actually doing the activity, which is arguably more conducive to learning than after-the-fact feedback. Another original feature is the ‘first-last’ letters mode for answering, which requires users to be actually retrieving component vocabulary, rather than just selecting and reordering presented words. The three separate sites which feature the LingoLab activity have functionally distinct purposes, as follows: www.lingolab.co (for self-study practice with progress tracking & sharing functions); www.lingolab.online (for a one-time quiz which reports all results to a teacher); www.lingolab.live (for an in-class real-time multiplayer quiz game).