Activity 7: Using Lesson for text prediction

Aim: Help students predict text

Moodle modules: Lesson

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: ***

Anything that involves games and guessing is likely to make learning more fun and effective. One way of making reading fun is to set up an anticipation exercise. The way it works is that we present some text — for example, a news item, a story, a poem — and then give students three or four options for the next line of the text. This gets students to think about the context and the language. The main thing is to make sure you've chosen a suitable text in the first place. There is not necessarily a wrong answer, but using the Moodle Lesson module, we can make different answers lead in different directions.

Let's take an example of a poem. Maybe you have a poem with different versions that the author contemplated, or that you made up. The different versions could become options for students to select. You could even get students to write their own texts and...