Using Multimedia in the Foreign Language Classroom | Page 13

2. 3 Authorable software
Motteram and Slaouti (2000, Unit 5: 4) refer to authorable pieces of
software as the ones which provide a framework into which the teacher can type her
own texts or exercises something which allows the teacher to give traditional
exercises a new potential. Such kind of activities, which become much more effective
when delivered electronically, are the ones which offer students the chance to
manipulate a text in order to restore it to its original form, usually referred to as text
reconstruction (TR) activities. According to Warschauer and Healey (1998) TR
activities are not limited to the ones which make available the total deletion of a text
but they also include cloze, sentence jumbles or crossword puzzles. Brett (1994: 331)
claims that, the rationale for the use of TR is that learners are provided with a
motivating and unique linguistic problem-solving task which involves and engages
them with authentic texts. Davies (1986:19) claims that TR encourages ‘…intensive
reading, and gives the student valuable insight into language redundancy and the way
words tend to combine and suggest what is coming next.
However Brett (1994: 330) stresses that TR undertaken in isolation can be
difficult, demotivating and detached of any communicative context or purpose and
suggests, rather, the use of TR as one in a sequence of communicative tasks. This
gives students the chance to be involved with TR after having activated relevant
schemata (Carrell and Esterhold, 1988) but also to appreciate the reconstructed text as
a communicative artifact and use it for the completion of subsequent tasks, complying
with what O’ Brien (2000, Unit 3: 36) refers to as the ‘task dependency’ principle.
One of the authorable programs, which the teacher can use to create activities
as the ones mentioned above is the ‘Hot Potatoes’ which is available from the internet
(http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/).
Some of the activities included in the ‘Hot Potatoes’ software are the
following:
a. The jquiz: This activity allows the teacher to create a number of True/
False questions which, according to West (2000, Unit 3) test fragmentary
comprehension of a reading text. The program can provide students with feedback
which can be tailored by the teacher.
b. The jcross: This activity allows the teacher to create a crossword puzzle.
The activity can be used to help students understand the meaning of some new words
from the context, as it is suggested in Heaton (1988: 53). The activity can not only
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