TOEFL Reading Comprehension Assistance Site Cleveland Q Crosby

TOEFL Reading Comprehension Assistance Site Cleveland Q. Crosby Advisors: Professors Aaron Cass and Junko Ueno Interdepartmental Senior Project (CSC – MLT)

Agenda Purpose and goals of Application n Background on the TOEFL n Content Overview (MLT) n Design Overview (CSC) n Problems Encountered n Future Work n

Project Purpose Design a web application to aid in preparation for the Reading Comprehension portion of the TOEFL test. n Make the site universally accessible through use of cross-platform acceptable character encoding. n Create a Mock-TOEFL test and grade it using HTML and PHP. n Avoid Java. Script as much as possible. n

T. O. E. F. L. Format Most common measure of North American English proficiency. n Administered mostly by way of computer. n Composed of 3 sections. n Listening Comprehension n Writing n Reading Comprehension n

Essential Topics for Reading Comprehension Understanding the nuances of English verb conjugations compared to those found in Japanese. n Understanding the subtle details of English. n Understanding the meanings behind colloquial English. n

Finished Product Demonstration

Content Overview n Pedagogical material covered • • • n Verb Tenses and their nuances Conditional Statements (“If” and “When”) Phrasal Verbs ( e. g. “Stand Out” or “Pull Through”) Idioms and Colloquialisms Explanations of smaller aspects of English (e. g. Contractions, Irregular verbs, Subject-Verb Agreement…) Mock Reading Comprehension test

Design Overview n Written entirely with the Unicode character encoding. (UTF-8) n Supported by the major operating systems. (Windows, Linux, Mac. OS) Style of the site is controlled with CSS. n A single Java. Script function is used. n n n Done so IE users can use the drop-down menus. Mock-TOEFL is designed using PHP.

Mock TOEFL Guidelines n Test is composed of multiple choice questions. Number of questions is up to the creator of the test. n Number of choices per questions is also left to the creator. n n Text found within delimiters is to be in proper HTML format. n E. g. if one wishes to input a left angle-bracket, they must type “< ” or “< ” in the text.

Demo (Text File to Test Page)

Demo (Cont’d)

How the Mock Test Page Works From a delimited text file on the server, PHP script reads and creates a test page with which the user to interacts. n HTML forms are used for multiple choice questions. n PHP checks the selected answers with the answers stored in a created array, and displays the right and wrong answers. n

Example (Test Correction)

Example (Cont’d)

Problems Encountered n Text encoding and display trouble n n CSS problems with Internet Explorer n n Mostly with Windows systems, for Asian character -sets must be installed separately. (Go Microsoft…) Essentially, it was IE’s fault. (Go Microsoft…) Determining the effectiveness of the Mock TOEFL n Surprisingly, NOT Microsoft’s fault…

Future Work n Continued additions to the information featured on the site. More Colloquialisms n More Phrasal Verbs n More Visual Aides. n Finding a way to gauge the effectiveness of the site. n Different language implementation…? n

Questions?