Saturday, June 2, 2012

Tools - Gapfill Printable Exercise Generator (Version 2)

Currently under testing

New and improved bells and whistles version

  1. Printable / saveable gapfill exercise generator for teachers
  2. Interactive gapfill tester for students (see 'Making an instant exercise')
New! Doc-friendly option - You can now make a more doc-friendly worksheet for copying and pasting into Word etc. This has a very basic layout and will be easier to alter in your word processor.
New! Quick Gapmaker - You can now make gaps quickly by simply clicking on the appropriate words in the Gapmaker.

For teachers

With this generator you can make printable gapfill exercises with a variety of ways of showing the gapped words, or not showing them at all (for example for a listening).
You can choose which words to gap, doing it manually. This will be even quicker if you use the integrated Quick Gapmaker (see below)
Or for an instant exercise, you can use either the Random gap maker or the Auto gap maker. This takes away selected groups of words, for example: articles.
You can also print a teacher copy with answers.
Probably the best way to see how everything works is to play around with the examples and all the options for a few minutes.

For students - Making an instant exercise

Any piece of text can instantly become an interactive gapfill exercise. Just copy and paste the text into the box, click on 'Quick Random Gaps' or use the automatic gap maker to remove prepositions etc, select a suitable 'Gap word option' and 'Interactive Web page'
For interactive exercises you can use the following options: Show words, No show and Anagrams. Or you can choose one of the other options and print it out. Click and Drop - In the Show words option, you can click on the words in the box and then on a suitable gap.

How to use - mouse over the ? signs and for more details.

1. Enter the title and instructions (optional): ? Position:
2. Enter a list of questions or a text ? then add gaps ?
Example:
3. Making gaps - Manual: Show , Random: Show , Auto: Show , Gapmaker: Show
4. Optional extras Show options
5. Fine tuning (numbering, font, word box options, etc) Show options -
6. Select gap word option Show details
7. Choose page type and
8. Open the exercise in a new tab or window (IE)
Your exercise will appear here

16 comments:

  1. Looks like another useful tool for teachers, thanks! I'd love to use your quiz generator but I don't have enough skills. Never mind, I am happy for others :)

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  2. Thanks Baiba. But you don't need any skills - just write a few questions, make a few gaps, press a couple of buttons, and Hey Presto!

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  3. Random gaps don't work.

    Any texts with paragraph returns disappears words.

    Try these two texts. First will have no problem. Second will lose words.

    one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve

    AND

    one two three
    four five six
    seven eight nine
    ten eleven twelve

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  4. I'm not quite sure what's happening with these numbers. I think it's something to do with you having very short 'paragraphs'.

    It seems to work on normal texts, however. I've just tried the example wedding text, and that works fine, as does a text I copied from The Guardian.

    There may be a problem, though, when it randomly gaps the last word of the paragraph. You might have to add in a paragraph return.

    I've just been trying it with something I posted a week ago and it seems to work:

    Apparently not. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of try in the sense of make an attempt involves try and, and they speculate whether it could be even older than try to + verb.

    What is more recent is the criticism of the idiom, and the divergence in use, starting in the nineteenth century.

    Bryan Garner, the American writer on usage, has suggested that while try and is seen as a colloquialism in American English, in British English it is regarded as a standard idiom, a point British etymologist Michael Quinion at World Wide World agrees with.

    This Ngram graph seems to support both these points. The lead of try to over try and in published books only becomes evident around the middle of the nineteenth century, and the difference between them is rather more marked in American-published books (red and blue) than in those published in Britain (green and orange).

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  5. @Tothe Newsom - OK, I can see there's a problem: sometimes it works, sometimes it loses a few words from the end of one paragraph and the beginning of the next. I'll have a look a it in the next week or so, and see if I can find out why. Thanks for pointing it out.

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  6. @Tothe Newsom - I think it's fixed now. I've tried lots of times with both ungapped texts, and they seem to be OK. It was a silly little line missing in the code. Thanks again.

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  7. Fantastic, This generator works really well. Just what I was looking for. Having so many options is wonderful. My students will now think I am professional!

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  8. Thanks for the comment. Glad you like it.

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  9. Great work! Thank you very much for your posts, they really help me a lot.I want to share this useful tool with my friends, but unfortunately Chinese government banned blogspot.com. So I translated this tool into Chinese and make a second post on my blog under the same CC license.During the translation, I found a tiny bug with Gap word treatment function and fixed it, which seemed to miss a variable definition named altAns.Here it is https://teaink.com/232.html . If there is any problems with second post, feel free to contact me. Thanks!

    BR

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  10. I absolutely love this generator. Thank you very much indeed, Sir.

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  11. The generator is extremely useful! Thank you very much for this!

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  12. Hello,
    thank you very much for your blog - it is excellent.
    However, I found that some optional exercises in treat gapwords for transformation don't seem to work.
    Can you help?
    Thanks
    Hans

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  13. Extremely useful.
    Thanks a lot.

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  14. I love this for creating printed exercises. In lockdown, however, I need to be producing materials like this that pupils can complete online. Does anyone know of a free tool which would produce interactive gapfills?

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  15. Hi,
    there are two versions of this Blog (gapfill ....) by Warsaw Will on the internet. The one that you refer to
    https://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2012/06/tools-gapfill-printable-exercise.html

    actually allows exactly that. Look at point 7. There you can choose the format in which you want to do the exercise and one possibility is interactive. I works very well.
    Cheers
    Hans

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  16. Hello,
    again, this is an amazing block with lots of excellent, helpful information/exercises...
    However, there are problems with the gapfiller. Some choices won't work. For example the transformation exercises.
    Th exercise will give you the word that is needed instead of the baseword, as intended by the exercise:
    Here is a transcript of the exercise.
    Word transformation - to infinitive or ing-form
    Choose the correct form of the verb

    I am interested in (1) _____________(taking) your class.
    They enjoy (2) _____________(watching) movies.
    She refuses (3) _____________(to listen) to her mother
    We agreed (4) _____________(to work) together.
    I need (5) _____________(to study).
    I'm curious about (6) _____________(travelling) to Africa.
    They postponed (7) _____________(playing) the game because of rain.
    They want (8) _____________(to get) good grades.
    Michael Jordan is good at (9) _____________(playing) basketball.
    I regret not (10) _____________(hugging) my parents.
    The criminal admits (11) _____________(taking) the money.

    I suppose it just needs a small correction in the Java script. Can you help, Will?
    Thank you so much.

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