Executing a Hear and Respond Lesson

When you execute a hear and respond lesson, you will see the text of a particular recording but with some words blank. The program will play back the recording, highlighting the annotated words as it goes, and stopping after reaching the first blank word. Your job is then to type in the correct word (or phrase). When you hit the enter key, there are three possibilities that we now list.

1. If correct, you will hear an acknowledgment sound, and the program will continue to the next blank word.
2. If you are close, perhaps because of a spelling error, you will hear a different sound, and the program will repeat the play back.
3. If you are way off, the program will output a third sound, and the program will repeat the play back.

The score in the upper right corner will show how you are doing. You continue filling in the blanks until the program gets to the end of the recording. For long recordings, you will see the display change at the end of each page. After the lesson completes, the process will start all over again, this time with a different set of missing words.

To make the process more enjoyable, there are several icon buttons. Simply click (or touch) the appropriate icon to hear the play back of the missing word, see the correct answer, pause the play back in the middle, continue onto the next missing word, or check your answer.

The three recording icons allow students to answer verbally, rather than typing the answer. Simply, say the answer and then click the check mark. The program will attempt to verify the accuracy of the response. This option works within the ACORNS application, but not within browser applications. Within the Android player application, you will not see the record buttons; but can use those that appear at the bottom of the display window. Language independent speech recognition is a difficult task for computers, so we are still attempting to improve the accuracy of this option.

Play Control Panel

On the bottom of your display you will see a row of buttons that are standard across all lesson types. For more information Click Here. Clicking on the middle button () causes a pop up menu to appear, which has options that are unique for each lesson type.Hear and Respond lesson options are shown with explanations below.