Using authoring software in MFL

Principles of teaching

For whole-class teaching, interactive materials created with authoring software are ideal as an attractive way of reinforcing or reviewing language or grammar learnt. Materials can be stored on the network and accessed during lesson time. The game format of many of the activities allows for the class to be split into teams, or set against the clock, which adds an air of competition and excitement. Students, or team members, can come to the interactive whiteboard and use its drag and drop facility to drag text into place, to match pictures with text, whether one word or a phrase or sentence, or to match sound with pictures or text. If working with electronic voting devices it is possible to see at a glance who has the right or wrong answer, thereby allowing the teacher to take immediate remedial action.

Activities can also be placed on the school network or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for independent work in the computer room or from home. It is very simple to create activities for reinforcing or reviewing vocabulary but there are more possibilities. The interactive features of the software allow students to work on grammar activities, to work at sentence level and to develop listening and reading skills. For the latter, text can be taken from the Internet and adapted to an appropriate level for students before being built into interactive materials. For listening activities sound recordings may be made, edited and saved as mp3 files with a free downloadable audio editor such as Audacity.  As interactive materials are relatively easy to create, it is quite feasible for a teacher to create a suite of activities graded in difficulty to cater for the differing levels of ability among students.

Activity types include

• Gap-fill
• Text matching
• Re-ordering letters in a word
• Reconstructing sentences or longer text
• Multiple choice
• Completing dialogues
• Matching text to pictures
• Matching text or images with sound
• Matching sound with sound
• Puzzles, crosswords and memory games

Interactive materials should be seen as part of an integrated series of activities enabling students to move towards independent language production. They serve as a reinforcement or assessment point as students move from tightly structured activities to freer more creative work. The instant feedback given with each activity is a perfect tool for self-assessment by students, who can keep a record of scores, and improvements when re-trying an activity. Students can print completed exercises as a record.