Rapid word recognition skills are essential for fluent reading in both L1 and L2. Until recently, "bottom-up" skills like word recognition received relatively little attention from L2 reading researchers and teachers. This is beginning to change, however, and researchers and teachers are beginning to recognize the importance of bottom-up skills, including word recognition. In many ways CALL is ideal for developing word recognition skills. Below are some CALL exercises that can be used for this purpose.
Hot Potatoes Exercises
These exercises, developed with Half-Baked Software's software package Hot Potatoes, are designed to help learners improve their ability to recognize words from the Academic Word List (AWL) fluently and rapidly. Click on the links below to access the exercises. For each of the 10 sublists of the AWL, there are two exercises (except for sublist 10, for which there is only one exercise). Also, each exercise can be done with either a 2-minute or 3-minute time limit.
| Sublist 9 Part 1 (2 min.) Part 1 (3 min.) Part 2 (2 min.) Part 2 (3 min.) |
Sublist 10 Part 1 (2 min.) Part 1 (3 min.) |