Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/ClozeFox

Description

ClozeFox is a Firefox extension for language learning purposes which generates fill-in and multiple choice exercises (cloze tests) on-the-fly from authentic pages on the Web. A language learner can easily turn an online authentic text into an interactive, meaningful and useful exercise by using ClozeFox. ClozeFox will allows language teachers to direct their students to selected and suitable web pages that turn into tailor-made exercises.

Learning from the past, ClozeFox is a beautiful example of pedagogy-driven design as it responds to a huge need for interaction on authentic content without labor-intensive authoring. At the same time, it exploits affordances of Firefox extensions and related Web 2.0 tools for guaranteeing personalization, socialization, and scalability in terms of languages, parsing intelligence, exercise types, feedback, error analysis, remediation, and tracking & logging.

INSTALL

Basic installation and usage instructions are provided at ClozeFox Install page.

Progress Reports

Progress reports are available here.

Background and rationale

Since the early eighties, computers have been used extensively to offer a wide variety of exercises to language learners and teachers worldwide (see the History of CALL). Early MS-DOS programs started to appear in USA, UK and even in Belgium: Verbapuces, Vocapuces and Texta by DIDASCALIA (Jozef Colpaert & Wilfried Decoo, University of Antwerp, Belgium), and Adam and Eve (University of Leuven, Belgium). They offered the most advanced functionalities, rarely equaled or surpassed by contemporary web applications (see Colpaert 2004).

One of the most frequent exercise types has always been the cloze-exercise. A cloze exercise is a type of fill-in exercise which requires "the ability to understand context and vocabulary in order to identify the correct words or type of words that belong in the deleted passages of a text" (Wikipedia). Scientific literature from the eighties on (Bachman, Alderson, Bormuth, ...) quickly indicated some limitations of this activity type for accurate measuring in language testing, but it has been used very intensively ever since in learning systems and environments (Moodle, Dokeos, Blackboard, Hot Potatoes, Question Mark, ...). It is interesting to see that two Flemish universities have even developed their own interfaces for content authoring in learning environments: Entreposage Universel for Blackboard (Jozef Colpaert, University of Antwerp) and Curios for Dokeos (Ghent University).

Where initially language courseware (dedicated, meaning designed for language learning, teaching and testing) was the most successful application type, gradually tools (non-dedicated) have been taking over the leading position, both in terms of use as in terms of research and publications. An easy explanation of this phenomenon might be the impact of Web 2.0, but a more serious analysis reveals two important factors: the labor-intensiveness of content development and the labor-intensiveness of software development (Colpaert 2004).

The close exercise type remains a widely demanded, meaningful, useful and effective activity type. The impact of its deployment depends on the extent to which we can reduce the cost of content authoring (by reusing existing material, making it more generic and exchangeable, by researching new ways of generating content and questions from authentic materials in a computer assisted way, ...), and the cost of software development (by using appropriate design models, by reusing existing components and expertise, by working in open source, ...).

Operation and Implementation Details

ClozeFox first checks the page on the amount of usable and useful text, text structure and language ID based on page info or on trigrammes. It then makes a frequency list of the words in the text.

The ClozeFox generator hides words on the basis of a routine with scalable intelligence: as a simple random routine would not be interesting from a linguistic-didactic point of view, ClozeFox will select gaps according to frequency level, word category, and later on semantic field, contrastive-linguistic aspect in order to turn the exercise into a rich learning experience.

ClozeFox generates fill-in exercises (for complete words or word-parts on morphological level such as word endings) and multiple-choice exercises (with other words in the text as generated distractors).

The ClozeFox options menu (with 'remembered' options) will include:

• Number of gaps
• Min/max length of gap
• Per word category: nouns, prepositions, verbs …
• Exercise type: written (with option whole word / partial word) and multiple choice (with option number of distractors)
• Time limitation
• Send exercise to ... (completed to show to parents/teachers what you have done as a learner; or 'empty' to send it as a teacher to your student or as a students to your co-students)

ClozeFox as an application is highly scalable on the following levels:

• The complexity of the routine for selecting gaps.
• The intuitive intelligence of the system to adapt to the user based on learner behavior, performance and errors.
• The possibility to add a refined morphological analyzer and parser later on.
• The possibility to ask for pronunciation (through sound synthesis) or translation of the word to fill in or any word in context.
• Turn ClozeFox into a real collaborative Web 2.0 social exercise generator:
  • Students will become able to exchange self-made exercises, store them in social collaborative repositories, teachers can ask them to do so and monitor progress.
  • Language teachers worldwide are expected to encourage to use Mozilla Firefox in order to enrich their own learning environment with a powerful tool for autonomous and/or collaborative learning.

ClozeFox can be seen as a first product in a series of tools for enhancing the (language) learning experience.

Mockups

Please visit the official description page to see a few mockups. You may find the progress reports about development here.

About the team

Prof. Dr. Jozef Colpaert is professor of Instructional Design and vice-chairman of the Institute for Education and Information Sciences (IOIW) at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He is also director Research and Development at the Language Institute LINGUAPOLIS of the University of Antwerp, and editor-in-chief of Computer Assisted Language Learning, an International Journal (Taylor and Francis). For the last three years, he has been an active member of the executive committee of CALICO, the US organization for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). He has been designing and developing CALL programs for the last 23 years and organizes the biennial International Antwerp CALL conferences (XIIIth edition). He is currently working on Distributed Language Learning, a methodological and conceptual framework for designing effective language learning environments and for determining the role of technology.

Emre Sevinc is an experienced software developer who designed and coded various web platforms for the last 10 years. Prior to joining the University of Antwerp in Belgium, he was involved with the design and development of the first online MBA e-learning system in Turkey. His current research areas are primarily computer aided language learning (CALL), natural language processing, and data mining. Previously he published scientific articles about e-learning, natural language processing, multi-agent systems, cognitive science and automatic recommendation systems. Besides his professional roles, he is also an open source developer who likes to create projects for machine learning, web programming and user task automation.

Linguapolis is the Language Institute of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). The institute (almost 100 teachers and researchers) organizes language courses and carries out R&D projects related to language learning, teaching and testing.