Although any language is more than just words, vocabulary is undeniably an essential part of it. Learning new words most of the times depend on memorization. OpenTeacher is intended to help foreign-language learners acquire new vocabulary. On flash cards, the learners will be presented with a word in one language to which they need to provide a match in another.
OpenTeacher is, above all, very easy to use. Over many years of experience as a teacher, I have seen excellent educational software fall into oblivion just because educators considered it too difficult to use. OpenTeacher is not very sophisticated, and its usability can surely gain many adepts among teachers and students. The program has two use modes. In the first one, you create the exercise. Just imagine that most of the work you have to do is to type the pair of words separated by an equals sign (=), as in the following example “foot=pié”. In order to help you enter foreign words, there is a panel with different sets of symbols, including the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. A symbol can easily be inserted by clicking on it.
Once you have created your list of word pairs, you can move to the learning mode. Four types of exercises are available here, each with a different level of difficulty. So, there is the Type Answer exercise, in which you get a word in language A and you need to type the word in language B. The Think Answer exercise will only ask you to think of an answer and then check it to see if it was correct. In a Shuffle Answer exercise you will receive a hint based on the scrambled letters that make up the correct answer. Finally, there is the Repeat Answer exercise, which is advisable for the first memorization drills. In this type of exercise, you get both words, then the second gradually disappears and the program asks you to enter it as answer. The program will keep track of your answers and deliver statistics for you to identify problem words. It will also grade each learning session. In addition to the four modes mentioned, you can also customize the lesson. For instance, you can set the question order, type of lesson, lesson order and words to ask. This way, you can control if the questions appear in the same order you entered them or in random order, or if the program only asks you those words you have been having problem to remember. The lessons can be saved to disk for later use or distribution among students and they can also be printed as handouts.
The phenomena of synonymy, homonimy and polysemy are common to most languages and establishing a one-to-one correspondence between two words is not ideal, and this is a limitation of OpenTeacher because, as usually said: “words are known by the company they keep” and this software provides no contextual reference for the studied words. However, it can be successfully used to teach or learn closed sets of words, such as body parts, for instance.
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