Plenty has been written about the benefits for motivated language learners of using parallel texts to help learn a language. (Do a quick google search and youโll see.)
Video guides / how-to videos to support the TextActivities website and blog ๐๐๐
All of the videos listed here can also be viewed via the TextActivities Info YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TextActivities/videos
A video intro to the resource page on TextActivities, looking at what all of the buttons do, the resource view and activity view tabs, the activity menu, the worksheet menu, plus a whistle stop tour of the various interactive activities. (Features the resource created in the "Creating a TextActivities Resource" video below.)
I had a go at using the free version of ChatGPT to generate some content to form the basis of a TextActivities resource. I was pleasantly surprised by how quick and easy the whole process was. See my prompts + the responses below, as well as a link to the resource at the bottom of the page.
Write me a text of about 100 words in Spanish, aimed at beginners, in the present tense, talking about what I do at the weekend
When it comes to exploiting texts for language teaching, the choice of text matters. Different types of texts suit different purposes.
Some types of text often seen in language teaching classrooms:
All resources on TextActivities.com have a worksheet printing option accessed via this button, which is visible in resource view and activity view:
This post examines "Assignments" on TextActivities. (For those familiar with Textivate, "assignments" are similar to Textivate's "sequences", but they work very differently. See section 1 (xiii) in this blog post comparing TextActivities and Textivate.)
Many of the activities available on TextActivities.com -- both text rebuild and vocab / matching -- can be seen as scaffolded dictation activities, i.e. which require students to listen to some language in the L2 (the target language) and also interact in some way with that same bit of language in its written form.
This blog takes a look at how this works and which modes to choose if your aim is to practise dictation-like activities.
This user-guide is for those new to TextActivities.
It explains how to create a class and how to create student accounts.
It also shows you what it looks like from a student's perspective when they go to the site for the first time.
This user guide is for those new to TextActivities.com
It explains how to import textivate resources into TextActivities.
You can do this even if your Textivate subscription has expired!
This user guide is for those new to TextActivities.com
It explains where to go and what to do so that you can start creating your own resource.
Click on the "Resources" menu option in the top nav bar of the site:
