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TOEFL Reading Comprehension Assistance Site

TOEFL Reading Comprehension Assistance Site. Cleveland Q. Crosby Advisors: Professors Aaron Cass and Junko Ueno Interdepartmental Senior Project (CSC – MLT). Agenda . Purpose and goals of Application Background on the TOEFL Content Overview (MLT) Design Overview (CSC)

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TOEFL Reading Comprehension Assistance Site

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  1. TOEFL Reading Comprehension Assistance Site Cleveland Q. Crosby Advisors: Professors Aaron Cass and Junko Ueno Interdepartmental Senior Project (CSC – MLT)

  2. Agenda • Purpose and goals of Application • Background on the TOEFL • Content Overview (MLT) • Design Overview (CSC) • Problems Encountered • Future Work

  3. Project Purpose • Design a web application to aid in preparation for the Reading Comprehension portion of the TOEFL test. • Make the site universally accessible through use of cross-platform acceptable character encoding. • Create a Mock-TOEFL test and grade it using HTML and PHP. • Avoid JavaScript as much as possible.

  4. T.O.E.F.L. Format • Most common measure of North American English proficiency. • Administered mostly by way of computer. • Composed of 3 sections. • Listening Comprehension • Writing • Reading Comprehension

  5. Essential Topics for Reading Comprehension • Understanding the nuances of English verb conjugations compared to those found in Japanese. • Understanding the subtle details of English. • Understanding the meanings behind colloquial English.

  6. Finished Product Demonstration

  7. Content Overview • Pedagogical material covered • Verb Tenses and their nuances • Conditional Statements (“If” and “When”) • Phrasal Verbs ( e.g. “Stand Out” or “Pull Through”) • Idioms and Colloquialisms • Explanations of smaller aspects of English (e.g. Contractions, Irregular verbs, Subject-Verb Agreement…) • Mock Reading Comprehension test

  8. Design Overview • Written entirely with the Unicode character encoding. (UTF-8) • Supported by the major operating systems. (Windows, Linux, MacOS) • Style of the site is controlled with CSS. • A single JavaScript function is used. • Done so IE users can use the drop-down menus. • Mock-TOEFL is designed using PHP.

  9. Mock TOEFL Guidelines • Test is composed of multiple choice questions. • Number of questions is up to the creator of the test. • Number of choices per questions is also left to the creator. • Text found within delimiters is to be in proper HTML format. • E.g. if one wishes to input a left angle-bracket, they must type “<” or “<” in the text.

  10. Demo (Text File to Test Page)

  11. Demo (Cont’d)

  12. How the Mock Test Page Works • From a delimited text file on the server, PHP script reads and creates a test page with which the user to interacts. • HTML forms are used for multiple choice questions. • PHP checks the selected answers with the answers stored in a created array, and displays the right and wrong answers.

  13. Example (Test Correction)

  14. Example (Cont’d)

  15. Problems Encountered • Text encoding and display trouble • Mostly with Windows systems, for Asian character-sets must be installed separately. (Go Microsoft…) • CSS problems with Internet Explorer • Essentially, it was IE’s fault. (Go Microsoft…) • Determining the effectiveness of the Mock TOEFL • Surprisingly, NOT Microsoft’s fault…

  16. Future Work • Continued additions to the information featured on the site. • More Colloquialisms • More Phrasal Verbs • More Visual Aides. • Finding a way to gauge the effectiveness of the site. • Different language implementation…?

  17. Questions?

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