"Textbooks from China"-style exercises

mahouer
April 18, 2007, 07:01 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi,

I hope this comment hasn't been made yet, I didn't come across it in the discussions so far.

I was just doing the exercises accompanying the ping pong lesson, I love it how most exercises are now much more useful just by adding extra examples (often 10 instead of 3).

But to my frustration the drag-the-words-into-the-right-sentence exercise is now in true Chinese style. In this case there was more than one solution, but only one specific solution checks out as correct.

I've had tons of students come to me with their middle-school homework here in China, asking me why a certain answer is required when their own choice is also perfectly valid but not what their teacher wants to hear. This rather reminds me of that.

Let me illustrate with examples from the lesson:

I can drag these three words, 抽球,回球 and 发球, and I'm quite convinced all of them would fit equally well into any of these sentences:

好,x 得分。
你们现在要练习 x。
快,正手 x。

The computer however checks out only one configuration. I believe there are problems with two other words as well.

I understand this won't be one of your first concerns so soon after the v3 introduction but I'd like to point it out anyway. I now know the confusing and frustration my own students go through at their middle school.

By the way, didn't I read that additional, different types of exercises would also be introduced in v3. I believe Ken Carroll wrote something on those lines in one of his blog postings prior to the introduction of v3. When can we expect these additional exercises?

Keep up the good work! 

Regards,

 

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