SBP Exercises

SPRING 2000

Questions about hardware or software compatibility?

Check out our FAQ page.

Just say no to multiple choice!

SBP's interactive exercises stress learner production. Click Ejercicios for an overview.

Internet-enabled multimedia?

Spanish for Business Professionals allows you to download daily news and financial updates over your internet connection. Bookmark our web site for details in the near future!

Wouldn't it be nice if students could e-mail assignments to instructor without leaving a tutorial?

The educational version of SBP comes with built-in e-mail window. Check out our Noticias page from time to time for more info.

Just say no to multiple choice!

SBP's interactive exercises stress learner production. Click Ejercicios for an overview.

Internet-enabled multimedia?

Spanish for Business Professionals allows you to download daily news and financial updates over your internet connection. Bookmark our web site for details in the near future!

Wouldn't it be nice if students could e-mail assignments to instructor without leaving a tutorial?

The educational version of SBP comes with built-in e-mail window. Check out our Noticias page from time to time for more info.

Real-time, peer-to-peer communication via the internet.

This is one of the technologies in SBP. Visit our Noticias site for updates on our progress.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could work on your Spanish at home and e-mail your assignments to your instructor?

The educational version of SBP comes with built-in e-mail window. Check out our Noticias page from time to time for more info.

Questions about hardware or software compatibility?

Check out our FAQ page.

Just say no to multiple choice!

SBP's interactive exercises stress learner production. Click Ejercicios for an overview.

Internet-enabled multimedia?

Spanish for Business Professionals allows you to download daily news and financial updates over your internet connection. Bookmark our web site for details in the near future!

Wouldn't it be nice if students could e-mail assignments to instructor without leaving a tutorial?

The educational version of SBP comes with built-in e-mail window. Check out our Noticias page from time to time for more info.

Find out who we are, and what we're up to.

Visit Personal for background on the SBP development team.

Spanish for Business Professionals will ship with its own interactive dictionary and grammar reference.

Our home page (Hogar) has an overview of SBP's built-in modules.

JUST SAY NO TO MULTIPLE CHOICE!

If you want your students to express themselves in a computer-based tutorial, would you rather have them use this...

...or this?

Multiple choice exercises have long been the bane of computer-assisted language instruction programs. They test only your recognition of the new language without allowing you, the student, to practice what you have learned. SBP's exercises focus on the learner's knowledge.

You supply the answers, and SBP supplies the feedback.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SBP INTERACTIVE BELOW!

Preguntas:

Okay, so one of our seven exercise formats is multiple choice. But this one is just a quick review to get you reoriented about the lesson you have just studied. It will only take you a couple of minutes.

The screen shots you see below actually cover less than half of your SBP dialog display (visit our Noticias page to view an image of a sample dialog). That way, the students have full access to the exercises AND the dialogs they are based on.

When students are finished with the review questions, they move on to the vocabulary exercises.

Vocabulario:

This screen shot shows a sample vocabulary drill with error-specific feedback. The words in the drill come from the SBP dialogs. At the prompt, the student enters the Spanish equivalent of an English word which appears on screen. SBP does a thorough analysis of your input and points out what's wrong. When the answer is correct SBP lets you know and moves on to another word.

Since most of the words in the exercise are hyperlinked, you will then hear them spoken out loud by native speakers once your answer is correct. SBP also keeps track of misspelled words, so that you can review them once your drill is finished.

Conjugación:

SBP's conjugation exercises allow students to use Spanish in context. Here, knowing the correct form of the verb is not enough. Students need to understand the entire passage so that they know where each verb fits. And they do not have to fill in the blanks in order! If they don't know which verb belongs in the first blank, they can move on to the next blank (or even the next page!) and come back later.

Of course, at every stage SBP does an error-specific analysis. In the verb exercises, students will know if an error is due to a missing accent mark, incorrect subject/verb agreement, or spelling errors. SBP links students directly and immediately to the grammar window where they can find out what's wrong.

Charadas

Charadas is an SBP word game which places even more emphasis on language in context. The game starts with a paragraph which summarizes one of the lessons a student has studied. As the exercise beigns, some of words in the paragraph are scrambled at random. This screen shot is an example: scrambled words appear in red. Students then click on a word to see a clue which will help them unscramble the word. When the type in their response, SBP checks it over carefully. When the entire sentence has been unscrambled, SBP puts it back in the paragraph.

That, however, is just the beginning. The sentences themselves appear in random order, and when they have all been unscrambled, students still have to arrange the paragraph so that it makes sense. Thus students practice their Spanish not only at word and sentence level, but at paragraph level as well.

Natural Language Processing:

As far as we know, SBP will be the first public-release educational software to use Natural Language Processing technology in its interactive component. Here's how it works. Students are given a general topic to write about. Our first exercise is "Tell us about yourself and your family." Students are supplied with a lexicon, and allowed to make up any sentences they wish, provided they use the words in the lexicon. SBP's proprietary parsing software does an analysis of the input, and flags any errors it uncovers. This screen shot shows an actual parse from this experimental approach to interactivity. Most language-instruction programs use "string-matching" codes to analyze input in exercises like these. They check a database of "acceptable" responses to see if the user's input matches the programmer's response. In SBP's writing exercise, there is literally an infinite number of sentences which the software must be prepared to analyze. Since you can't create a database with an infinite number of anything, string-matching won't work. That is why SBP's parser is entirely rule-driven. It allows for the widest possible range of creative language use on the student's part.

Repetición:

We haven't forgotten spoken Spanish! Our corpus of exercises also includes "Repetición," which allows students to record their own voices and compare their pronunciation to that of a native speaker.

The on-screen controls allow the user to adjust the speaker volume, and even allow you to access Macintosh's Control Panels without quitting. Use the Control Panels to make sure that the sound input is set correctly for use with a microphone.