The TaskMagic Blog

Text Match is probably the most used component of TaskMagic and can be used in so many different ways...

This series of blog posts - "Text Match exercises - what to match?" - explores some ideas for the kinds of things that teachers can use as the basis for their text matching exercises. Each blog post contains screenshots of - and links to - interactive exercises as well as worksheets which can be viewed online, downloaded, printed etc. (SCROLL DOWN FOR THE WORKSHEETS)

It's easy to make gap exercises based on on any topic, by typing a gap in the sentence on the left using the undescore key, and typing in the missing letter(s) on the right.

See the Text Match edit screen below:

The example above uses 16 short French phrases, each with the letters representing the E sound removed. (I appreciate that the E sound in each word is not pronounced exactly the same, but to most English speaking learners of French there is very little difference.)

It's a good idea to make each gap the same size, so that students can't work out the answer based simply on the length of the gap. I usually use 3 underscore characters for each gap, so that each gap looks like this ___. The important thing to remember is that the gaps must be exclusive, so that there is only one possible word (or group of words) which can fit into each gap. Be aware that the more items you include in this type of exercise, the more difficult it becomes to ensure that each gap is exclusive.

See the range of activities on the menu screen below, all generated automatically based on the above items:

So that's 18 interactive games and exercises based on the same info. The Drag & Match screen (below) is just one of the exercises available.

And the following worksheets are all generated automatically based on the same items.

Matching

Fr Esound Match

Multi-Match

fr_esound_multimatch

Pairs Cards

fr_esound_pairscards

Write

Fr Esound Write

Dominoes

Fr Esound Dominoes

The following gap-fill exercises were created by exporting the file to Mix and Gap and editing the contents a little. The first one includes the word list, the second one doesn't.

Gap-fill (1) (with word list)

Fr Esound Gaps w Clues

Gap-fill (2) (no word list)

Fr Esound Gaps Wo Clues

See the Text Match page on the TaskMagic3 website for details of all of the interactive exercises and worksheets available in the Text Match component of TaskMagic3 (including notes on the level of difficulty of the various activities, suggestions for use in class etc).

If you already have TaskMagic3 on your computer, click here to open the above Text Match file in TaskMagic3. Right-click the link for options to save the file to your computer so that you can then open it with TaskMagic Create and edit the contents. (Click here to open the Mix and Gap file based on the text match, from which the last 2 worksheets were printed.)

If you don't already have TaskMagic3, you can download a 30-day trial from http://www.mdlsoft.co.uk/trialdownloads.htm

Visit the TaskMagic website for lots more information about TaskMagic: http://www.mdlsoft.co.uk

See this video tutorial on creating Text Match files in TaskMagic3:

See these extensive video tutorials on all aspects of creating Text Match exercises.

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