The exam contains about 90 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions, and progresses from easier points of grammar — verb conjugation in the present, possessive and demonstrative adjectives — to more difficult ones — choice between past tenses, use of the conditional and the subjunctive.  There is a section to test reading comprehension, consisting of questions concerning a short text. The exam is configured to allow students to access the questions only once and has a time limit of 1 hour 15 minutes.  Student answers are saved to a database and scores can be exported into a spreadsheet.  Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.”

One area of study that Prof. Kyoko has focused on is vocabulary instruction. She has worked with Media Services to record hundreds of vocabulary items and used a spreadsheet to document all the metadata for each item including Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji representations of a given word, its English translation, grammatical categorization and information about lessons it appears in. All of this information was then imported into a database that was accessed by a web application she helped design for vocabulary study that allows students to specify items they know and don’t know, tracks their study habits and generates quizzes customized to their particular knowledge of the items studied.

Technologies:

Uses » Audio » Record/edit/format audio, Share audio on the web

Tools » Audacity, Voice Recorders, Microphones, iPods