Dr. H. Werner Hess
Hong Kong Baptist University
Dept. of Government and International Studies

In this part, you will create a reading comprehension exercise with multiple choice questions. 

For the purpose of this exercise, we use a short biography of Vincent van Gogh, published in Russia, at Olga's Gallery. The text (slightly shortened) is already pre-saved for you here. Copy this text into Word/Frontpage and save it as a Web page (*.htm) under the name vangtxt.htm (in your main desktop folder). 

Please read the text before you start creating the exercise.

• Open the Hot Potatoes suite and click on "JBC". 

• Enter a title. The new exercise should have the title "The Life of Vincent van Gogh".

• Now you can immediately enter reading comprehension questions. 

Please note that he degree of difficulty of this exercise depends on how you ask and what you ask for. 

You may ask simple questions which require the student just to locate a key information bit on the text surface, e.g. "When was Vincent van Gogh born?", "Where was he born?". The student would then click simply match the year and place given in the text with the identical one in the exercise. He/she would actually not have to understand the text in its whole depth..

Another way of asking could require simple yes/no answers, e.g. "Was Vincent van Gogh a religious person?" or "No one in his family encouraged him to paint."

A third way of asking could require the student to identify an "answer" as a summary of a larger paragraph of the text, e.g. "Having witnessed the misery of Belgian coal miners had a profound influence on his art during his formative years." In both cases, the student would have to read the text far more carefully than in the first case.

Before you start, also think about the way you will phrase the multiple choices. The difficulty of multiple choice tests is often not the underlying text - but the way teachers ask questions (and the distinction clarity between items).

Now, you can enter questions. For the purpose of this exercise, we try all three possibilities.

In the box next to "Q1" enter the following question:

• How long did Van Gogh work as a teacher in England?

Now you have to provide the choices for the student answer (with a minimum of two).

In the text boxes below "Answer", enter three choices:

• A about a year

• B less than half a year

• C three quarters of a year

Note that it is relatively easy to find the corresponding text passage. But the formulation of the "answers" may require a short calculation on the part of the student - which (strictly speaking) may not be a "reading comprehension" issue at all ...

Now you have to tick the box to the left of the correct answer (click on the small box left to it). The program then "knows" whether a student was right or not - and it would "tell" the student with a default message ("Correct!" / "Not correct!".

However, the right-hand column "Feedback" gives you the possibility to add some personal comment. The comment can point out where/why the student got it wrong, it can encourage him/her - or be simply damning, depending on the way you phrase it.

In the feedback column, enter the following remarks (in the order given here):

• That's too vague! Check the text again.

• That's nonsense! Please read carefully before you click!

• Exactly, you are right! Well done!

Now click on the tab next to "Q1" and open "Q2".

Enter the following:

• Is it correct to say that Vincent van Gogh's family never encouraged him to become a painter?

Under "Answer", simply enter

• yes

• no

• I don't know

Decide which choice is correct and tick the box next to it.

Under "Feedback", give some commentaries, e.g.

• A Sorry, but that's wrong. Please check the text again.

• B That's right. He was financially and emotionally quite dependent on his younger brother.

• C You are just lazy!!

Now click on the tab next to "Q2" and open "Q3".

Enter the following:

• Was van Gogh a religious person?

Under "Answer", you can now enter sentences like

• A No, because he eventually gave up his religious profession for the sake of art.

• B Yes, but he was not good enough to work in a religious capacity.

• C No. He was religious when young. But then he just spent his time with models in cafés.

Decide which choice is correct and tick the box next to it.

Now add feedback comments, such as ...

• A Well, being an artist does not necessarily mean to give up religious beliefs, does it?

• B Right. He would have become a professional preacher if only his rhetorical talents had been better.

• C Well, the text mentions his time in the cafés of Paris. But does it really say that van Gogh had stopped to be deeply religious?

For the purpose of this exercise, we don't enter more questions.

Now please save the exercise with the file name vangogh2.jbc in your desktop folder.

You should the configure the exercise as you have learned in step 1 of this workshop.

This time, you should also click on the "Reading" tab in the configuration screen. You may change the student instructions here - but for now, we leave the default instructions. 

Finally, click on the "Other" tab". Hot Potatoes lets you decide the order in which questions appear on the screen. Make sure you UNCHECK "Shuffle questions". For a reading comprehension exercise, questions in random order are simply unsuitable!

If you want your students to read this text online before or while doing this exercise, you must instruct the program to do so.

Go to the menu bar of the main screen and click on the open-book icon (Add Reading Text).

Check the box "Include a reading text".

Under "Source" you have two options:

a) click on "External file" and "Browse", locate the file (vangtxt.htm) and click "OK".

b) Click "From text entered below". Copy the text from vangtxt.htm into JBC directly.

If you try out both, you will see the difference. Copying the text into JBC removes the hyperlinks of the original text. Your students would no longer be able to call up the images linked to the original source text (which may not be a bad idea for focusing on a reading task ...)

Lastly, you can limit the time students can read the text. In this case, click "include a timer" and select a period (minutes). If you don't select a timer, the reading text will remain onscreen next to the questions.

Finally, click "OK" and save your exercise again.

Click on the spider net ("5") and export the exercise to a Web file. Call this file vangogh2.htm, save it - and have a look at your finished exercise. It could look like this:

Finally, do not forget to place a link to vangogh2.htm in your lesson page (see step 1 above).

continue / weiter

back / zurück