I teach and create e-learning H5P materials for English language students in Saudi Arabia. It can be a slow process to create materials and a challenge to ensure the materials are effective. I want to share how I created a research-based spelling activity interactive book.
AI for synthesising educational research.
I asked Google Bard about common errors Arabic speakers have with English based on research.
Bard’s reply:
Studies show that Arabic learners of English make significantly more English spelling errors than other English second-language learner groups and that they make more errors with vowels1. The omission of short vowels in Arabic writing has been proposed to cause vowel blindness in English, resulting in poorer spelling performance1.
However, a study that compared the distribution of short and long-vowel errors and vowel and consonant error types from handwritten texts by Arabic learners of English found that only the distribution of vowel graph-choice and insertion errors significantly differed from the number of consonant errors by subcategory. Graph-choice errors, not omission errors, were exceedingly the most common error type. Vowel length was not significantly associated with either vowel omission or graph-choice as expected under the vowel blindness hypothesis. The results did not indicate a missing vowel orthographic transfer effect as the primary reason for Arabic learners of English’s orthographic production difficulty in English1.
Instead, the study proposes an underdeveloped lexical-orthographic-representation hypothesis to account for both the degree and range of errors found. The study also found that low and high proficiency groups only significantly differed in consonant graph-choice and silent-graph error categories, with the advanced group performing better. These results suggest that Arabic learners of English’s spelling skills are not markedly improving with the advancement of other writing skills and that they may need explicit spelling instruction, especially to connect vowel phonemes with multiple graphemes1.
Is there anything else you would like to know?
© Bard 2023
AI for creating examples
Now to turn that into an activity, I asked Bard to provide 20 example words for Arabic first-language learners of English to practice connecting vowel phonemes with multiple graphemes.
Bard’s reply:
Here is the previous list of 20 example words that Arabic first language learners of English can practice to connect vowel phonemes with multiple graphemes:
beat
seat
meat
heat
feat
neat
wheat
cheat
treat
greet
fleet
sheet
street
sweet
tweet
complete
concrete
compete
delete
© Bard 2023
Drag and drop activity
I needed a way to present the spelling words but I wanted to go beyond simply listing them So I sorted them into groups and then used Google Slides to make the background image for the drag-and-drop task. I resized the slide to 800px, downloaded it as an image and uploaded it to a H5P interactive book. The process to build the rest was similar to my drag-and-drop video tutorial.
Fill in the blanks activity
Next, I asked Bard to write one short sentence in simple English for each of these words in the list.
Bard’s reply:
Sure! Here is a short sentence in simple English for each of the words in the previous list:
I can beat the drum.
Please take a seat.
The room is neat and tidy.
Wheat is used to make bread.
Do not cheat on the test.
They greet each other warmly.
The bed has clean sheets.
The parade marched down the street.
The candy is very sweet.
The project is now complete.
The building is made of concrete.
Please delete the file.
© Bard 2023
AI for formatting text for H5P
H5P fill in the blank questions need asterisks * around the blank word that needs to be typed. I wanted to explore how AI can be used to reformat text in the way that H5P understands for people who may have lots of content to transfer to H5P from other systems. Admittedly this part is not necessary for this task that only has a few sentences.
I tried to ask Bard to surround the words given previously in asterisks the text but it either printed the words in bold or in italics. I found that asking it to write it in HTML worked.
AI for frequency analysis
Another task Bard or other AI tools can do related to language teaching is to provide a frequency analysis. It makes sense to teach the most frequent words so they are worth the effort to learn. Asking Bard which words are the least frequent from the list helped me to decide which words to remove.
AI for audio generation
A common concern that isn’t really an issue at all within the field of teaching English as a foreign language I’ve noticed is that some non-native speakers are worried about their accent and therefore reluctant to record their voice. So I’d like to point out that there are many text-to-speech websites available that you can download and insert into H5P content. I used Free Text-To-Speech to create the audio for each sentence in the fill in the blank activity.
So that’s how I made this activity. I’ve shared it under Creative Commons licence CC BY NC so feel free to download it and adapt it.
