Sharon Yoneda's tips for choosing distractors for ESL video

ESLVIDEO TOP TEN:

Here are the Top Ten ways of choosing distractors for eslvideo.com
quizzes (not yet featured on David Letterman's Late Night Show).

Here we go Number 10: Use minimal pairs in initial, medial and final
position.

/p/ and /b/; /k/ and /g/; /f/ and /v/; / Ê/ and /Ê'/; /t/ and
/d/; /s/ and /z/, etc.

e.g.: "You were my eyes when I couldn't see. You saw ______
there was in me."

* the best
* the pest
* the mess

Choose common phoneme errors made by linguistic groups. The dental
sounds /θ/ and the / ð/ are particularly problematic for most
ESL learners.

e.g.: "I _____ the Lord for the nighttime to forget the day."

* sank
* thank
* dank

Number 9: Select distractors with discrete vowel sounds.

e.g.: "Man, I ______ like a woman!"
* fall
* feel
* fool

Number 8: Respect collocation and "chunking" of word units in
English. Cloze the articles with the nouns and for higher levels, even
strings of possessive pronouns and adjectives etc., should be clozed
together.

e.g.: "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot, with a pink
hotel and __________."

* a swinging hot spa
* a swinging hot spot
* a swinging hot space

Number 7: Select homonyms to test spelling and meaning.

e.g.: "Got to get back to the land, set ______ free."

* my sole
* my soul
* my soil

Number 6: List phrasal verbs with different prepositions.

e.g.: "They paved paradise and ____ a parking lot."

* put on
* put out
* put up

Number 5: Use different contractions for verb tenses and agreement.

e.g.: "If I had a million dollars, ______ buy your love!"

* I'm
* I'll
* I'd

Number 4: Use words with the same prefixes, suffixes or root words.

e.g.: "He was a boy; she was a girl. Can I make it any more
_______?"

* obvious
* oblivious
* obnoxious

Number 3: Choose different cases (parts of speech) of words. In the
case of nouns, the articles `a', `an' or `the'
should be included with the noun to reflect a unit or `a chunk'
of language. For higher levels, even phrases with adjectives can

be used as distracters to encourage students to see English as chunks
of words.

e.g.: "Why'd you have to go and make things so _______?"

* complicate
* complicated
* complicating

Number 2: Check for fluency in English by listing reductions in words
such as `gonna', `hafta', `gotta', etc.

e.g.: "I think I'm _______ have a son."

* going to
* goin'
* gonna

…..drumrolls and Paul Shaffer's
signature tease…..

THE NUMBER 1 WAY OF CREATING A DISTRACTOR IS:

BLOG UNTIL THE MIND IS ADDLED AND RESORTS TO SILLINESS.

e.g.: "If I had a _______, I'd ________ in the morning.
I'd ______ in the evening, all over this land."

a: humour

b. hammer

c. Hummer

With Paul Shaffer's drumrolls, I would argue that quizzers need to
move "out of the pedagogical box" and adopt a free-style form
of quizzing [within reason of course]. . After all, music is free-style
often not conforming to the standards of English mechanics and syntax.

I choose to inject the element of humour into some of my distractors if
the situation allows and there are no other alternatives. I am
pleased when my students arrive back to class the following morning
after a song assignment with a smile on their faces. They often
relate one of the strings as being funny, and therefore: memorable. Is
not retention a desirable outcome of instruction?
www.trcs.eslvideo. com does come with a
User's Beware: there are some silly moments on the site.

Enjoy.

Sharon Yoneda
http://www.trcs.eslvideo.com/



Thanks to Ryan Detwiler, who asked Sharon for these tips to share in the EVO video sessions 2010