XpressLab

Teachers have shared many creative ideas for exercises and tests. Here are some popular ones to consider.
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Vocabulary Recognition
	Questions can be used to determine whether students have learned vocabulary in the target language. Using a graphic related to the vocabulary item helps to provide a context for the question but it is not essential. Your question could take the form of “What is this?” or the like.
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Thematic Questions
	Using a picture prompt, you could ask questions related to a theme which had been presented in class. For example, if you had taught students how to talk about the weather in the target language, you could have a series of questions related to pictures of various weather conditions in which you would ask students what the weather was like in each picture.

Group Composition
	The Small Group Discussion Forum encourages groups of two or three students to help each other with vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation in the process of preparing and recording a short oral presentation. Each student will record a part in a role play activity or record a portion of a presentation. XpressLab allows each student to record his or her part, press “pause’ and then pass the headset to the next student until all parts of the presentation have been recorded. The final recording is played back as one continuous audio file. Students learn from each other and they enjoy this type of lab activity.
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Reading
	Questions can be used to measure a student’s reading ability or reading comprehension. You can use a text prompt rather than a picture prompt and ask students to read what they see on the screen. A question could be as simple as asking students to read a work or a short sentence or it could require them to read a short passage. You could also ask students to read a longer passage but you would have to provide them with a handout sheet with the passage on it since longer passages won’t fit into the space available for prompts.

	If you want to assess students’ reading comprehension as opposed to their ability to ready aloud, you could ask students to read a passage and then pose questions designed to determine whether they had understood what was read. Alternatively, you could ask students to summarize in their own words what they had read.
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Cloze Exercises
	A cloze exercise is a text passage in which one or more words in a series of sentences are left out. Students must demonstrate their language competency by completing the sentences with words that make sense. You can use the text box to create cloze exercises which would require students to read a passage aloud, completing it with words that would make sense.
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Dictations
	You could record a dictation that students would have to write on a sheet of paper you give them. Students would submit the written dictation to the instructor after completing it.
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Written Responses to Oral Prompts
	You could also ask students to listen to a recorded passage and then ask them to summarize in writing what they had heard or to respond in writing to questions that you posed about the passage.
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Situational Questions
	You could pose situational questions to students in which they would be required to speak about a situation suggested by a picture or text prompt. For example, if you used a picture of two people at a table in a restaurant, you could ask your students to say what they thought the people were going to order or what they might be talking about. Or you could ask what the people in the picture would do if they realized that they had forgotten their money.
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Oral Recording Prompts
	You can use oral recordings as question prompts. For example, you could record a portion of a class lecture and, after the students listened to it, they could be required to respond to questions about the lecture or give a summary of what they heard.
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