THE NEW FEATURES OF SYNTEX - Teachit English€¦ · Web viewSimply drag any word you like to a new...

USING THE SYNTAX EXPLORER IN THE CLASSROOMINFO ON THE NEW FEATURES OF SYNTEX

Syntex is designed to explore the way words are arranged. It allows you to show how groups of words function together as units within a sense-structure like a sentence. Furthermore, you can illustrate how the overall impact of a statement or a sentence is affected by the order of these units, and the role of punctuation in regulating the emphasis, or focus, desired by the writer.

Simply drag any word you like to a new position in the sentence. When you drop it, the text will open up to accommodate it and close round it. Persist if it doesn’t land exactly right the first time. Try the beginning or end of the next line if it falls incorrectly.

If you hover your mouse over the join between two words, you will see a round blue join-symbol appear.

Click on it, and the two words join to be come one draggable unit, changing colour as they do. You can split them up again, if you wish by clicking on the little fault-line symbol that appears between the two joined words.

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You can edit the text if you want to, but be aware that this action will re-sort the text into its original order. You can also start again, by clicking Reset Order

At the foot of the screen you can find helpful hints and tips:

Adverts and HeadlinesSome forms of short expression are especially designed to convey meaning as briefly and succinctly as possible – the headlines of newspapers and the big words on road-side advertisements are good examples (the latter especially so, since the writer knows the reader will only have a few seconds to catch the message).

The exact arrangement of the words takes considerable thought to achieve, and in the case of adverts, costs huge sums of money.

We have collected a range of examples taken from newspapers and magazines. To make the process a sort of puzzle, the text is collapsed into alphabetical order or mixed up and the punctuation marks are listed at the beginning. A difficulty rating is provided to give you guidance so that you don’t launch on an impossibly difficult puzzle. However, you should not emphasise the puzzle or game – that is simply a device to enable you to lead the lesson with questions, to make students think. What you should try to do is to identify the clues that enabled you to arrive at a satisfying solution to the question “In what order should these words be arranged?”

A typical procedure might be this, illustrated here as series of questions that a teacher might ask a class, using an interactive whiteboard or similar technologies:

Questions Discussion ideasDo any words go together? Take suggestions and join the words

the class has identified into unitsWhy do these words go together? Do they always form a group? Are they inseparable like close-knit friends, or do they sometimes allow other words

Sometimes association comes from sense and long established collocation; sometimes alliteration and rhyme play a part. Look out for these



to join? pattern markers.Are there any strange words in the list? Words that signal an argument such as ‘if’ or ‘but’? Words that demand the co-operation of other words, such as ‘even’ or ‘like’ or ‘as’? Where will these words fit in?

Outliers in terms of sense are often the best clues as to the sense of the whole! Identify these strong strangers and the meaning of the sentence emerges like magic.

What order should the units be in? Move the units around within the sentence. You can move a unit onto the scratchpad to give yourself more room, or to focus discussion on a smaller range of options, with the words “We can try to fit this unit in later.”

What clues or rules did you use to decide the order of the units and the single words?

Remember that many adverts strip away everything, leaving single words to do the work – a series of verbs, or nouns – and the exact order of these words is crucial to the overall impact of the writing. Again, sometimes there is obvious alliteration, sometimes rhyme plays a part, so watch for patterns.

How current is the language? Old fashioned sentences sometimes have complicated, elaborate sentence structures, and out-of-date usages. Very modern usage may use a ‘hip’ expression. There are examples of each here.

What is the first word? What might be the last idea?

Identifying the opening word is a huge advance. Just to make it a subject that requires thought, we have removed all capital letters except from proper nouns. The last idea is usually the punchline of the sentence, and often the writer has gone to great lengths to organise the sentence so that it ends with a ‘bang’?

Where should you place the punctuation marks?

The punctuation from the original is supplied. Where should it go? The obvious full-stops are not so obvious if the extract consists of two short statements, both terminated by full-stops. In advertising, to increase impact, sometimes each phrase is treated like a sentence with its own full-stop. Why are the commas placed there? Why might certain words be enclosed in single quotation marks? What are the implications? How do



dashes work? And pairs of dashes marking parenthesis?

You will find that even the texts given a difficulty rating of 1 have a lot to offer in terms of teaching points. They are definitely worth tackling and discussing in depth.

Advertising agencies report that it is often the phrases that consist of a tiny number of words that take the most time and money to generate – a common paradox!

Above all encourage experiment – not the quick search for the right answer. What alternatives can actually work, and of those, which ones make sense?

Try the headlines first, and then move on to the adverts.

Only try the Extras when you want a good puzzle to get your teeth into.

These examples can be used throughout the age range, including KS5. Some excellent lessons on the principles of sentence construction can be constructed here.

And never forget that once you have grasped the idea you can input your own text, jumbled or not.

THE NEW FEATURES OF SYNTEX

We've made extensive improvements to Syntex following feedback from users.

New features on the Input Page

The input page consists of a text input box where you can type or paste your text. Below that you can set a number of options.

Input Text1) Linked wordsIf you want to, you can link words together to make a phrase that cannot be split up later. The program will treat these linked words as one word. To do this enclose the chosen phrase in these special brackets: < ….>

Here's an example, forcing the words "in your sentence" into one unit:



The effect when you click Explore Syntex is this – the words appear on one tile and cannot be split apart:


This tile cannot be split


2) Line breaksIf you want to introduce line breaks into your input text you can now do so. This is especially useful for processing short poems or illustrating new paragraph rules in speech. Use the ¬ symbol which can be found to the left of the numbers on the keyboard (use Shift to get it).

It looks like the standard carriage return symbol when you see it in Syntex.

It has the effect of forcing a line break in the text:


The line break symbol


The Option panels:

You can choose whether or not to have a scratchpad.

Select the punctuation palette if you want to have a constantly available selection of punctuation marks available (relevant if you're illustrating punctuation of parenthetical commas or speech).

The Alpha Sort option will automatically scramble the text for you (actually, it simply sorts it into alphabetical order). Leave it on No if you want to preserve the word order of your input text. However, scrambling a short text is a brilliant way to grab pupil's attention – nothing attracts quite so successfully as a challenging puzzle, as long as it's not too difficult.

You can set the size of the font that will appear in Syntex. Leave it as it is for medium length texts – select Large if the text is short; Small if it's long.

New features on the Working Syntex Page

There's plenty to relish here. A colour-marking mapping system allows you to dramatise graphically how a sentence breaks up, or the function-class of particular words. It's so easy! Click on the word (it'll acquire a red border) and then click on the colour you want. You can colour code a word or a whole phrase.


Select a tileClick on the colour you want it to be.


You can dispose of a tile if you want to by dragging it to the bin

You can change the case of the first letter of a tile by clicking on the T or the t buttons.

The new punctuation palette gives you onscreen access to all the standard punctuation marks including the carriage return.


Click on the T symbol to change the first letter of the tile to Upper Case. Click on the t

symbol to change the first letter of the tile to Lower Case.


How might you use Syntex to illustrate the punctuation of speech? First use an example that has been stripped of its punctuation. It will appear like this:

Generate the appropriate punctuation marks, and assign strong contrasting colours to them (the yellow tiles contain commas)

If you've included another speaker in the input text, you can use the new line break symbol to illustrate how paragraphs work

And of course you can use the magic functionality of Syntex to join up all the speech belonging to one speaker, or mark other multi-word units.



The best advice anyone can give you if you're new to Syntex is simply "Have a go!". It'll all be very obvious when you try it!


The words of a single speaker have been joined up and colour-coded

This clause has been combined and colour coded, Note the use of bracketing commas


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