Telescopic Texts

Telescopic Texts:                                              Click on the title to view the example I made for you!


Whenever you ask a student to do a writing task, they would frown upon you, or they would do it reluctantly. It could really be an arduous and bitter experience if students are to embark on writing and their thoughts would look like this:

This is 'Wordle.com' word cloud program I will talk about in another post

Well, these days are over. Getting students to write will be an interesting activity as much as any other enjoyable task.

What is this?
Telescopic Texts is an amazing tool for learners to break the barrier of anxiety and fear and get them started in developing their writing skills. It starts with a simple line or sentence that whenever you press on a part of it, a new word or clause appears in its place. It is very interestingand a fabulous tool for learning the mechanics of writing.
Here is an example I made for my learners:

The foldable text is hidden under the highlighted words and can be revealed with the click of a button. This tool has been recently modified and has many features now and very interesting to work with.

Why to use it?
You can see the tutorials on how to use in addition to the points I made for that.




• Simply because it makes the writing experience a lot of fun and it is a lot of fun.

• Its simplicity allows gives learners the courage to try it out and relieves the fear they might have towards writing.

• Once students have created their own foldable text, they can publish it and share it with their teachers and colleagues. Therefore, writing will be a purposeful activity with a target audience.

• It makes use of the sense of anticipation for learners to know what words are hidden.

• They can make infinite predictions for every hidden text. They can check their predictions. They notice, investigate and find answers to their predictions and subsequently they make connections and go beyond the text at hand and acquisition of language occurs.

• This tool can be used to reinforce collocations, grammar points, punctuation, text elements, analyse paragraphs, understand coherence, cohesion, and little focus on genre.

• It promotes autonomy in that learners can build their texts at home and has intrinsic motivation at its heart because learners showed profound enjoyment in producing these texts.

• Teachers and learners can switch roles and they can defy the teacher to unlock their text in a whole-class activity. They can even defy each other.

• It does not need a fast internet connection and it is free all-for-grabs. It increases collaboration because learners assign roles for each other while they are negotiating meanings. They have a leader who is authorised to press the button and enters the collaboratively decided upon words.

How to use it?

1. Just let you learners try the example of the text made by Joe Davis, the author, and put them into groups of twos, or more to create and publish their own texts.

2. Then, they will produce their own texts and test you or each other.

3. Always bear in mind a language focus or you can use an on-the-spot approach in that you can focus on common mistakes everyone get a fix on them. Here is how the text I made look now:

Limitations:

The only limitations I can see are two:

01 This tool cannot be shown in internet explorer since it is made using pencil and paper, but it can work using any other browser like Mozilla, Firefox, Google Chrome……..

02 Once the texts are published, they cannot be edited again. So it is the only drawback, but students can always create new ones and notice their improvements.