Help in English for Tester Screen

General

After the selection is made from the Selection Screen, members will be shown this screen. It is designed to help members learn foreign vocabulary. The ideal way to proceed is as follows:

Preview

When first presented with your selection it is likely that you won't be familiar with most of the words and phrases. Therefore, the first action is to preview the selection. Click the Preview button and you are presented with the foreign word/phrase and the translation in your own language. At the same time the pronunciation of the foreign word/phrase is given. Use the Next button to step through the selection until you are confident that you remember most of the words. Then End Preview.

Testing Mode

Each item in your selection is presented at random. If you have followed the recommendation, the first time through you will be presented with a word/phrase from your secondary language and you will hear it's pronunciation. You also see on the top line a description of the item: Its unique ID, Level, Type and Category. Translate the word/phrase then click Answer when you will be presented with the correct translation. If you were correct, click "Right?" else click "Wrong?" Each time you are correct, one is added to the score for that item. When you are wrong, one is subtracted. Your score for each word is shown at the bottom of the screen. The next random item will be displayed automatically.

Additional Information and Related Words

When using the tester screen you will often see additional information and instructions displayed. If the item is a verb, as well as showing the first person singular, present tense, you will also see displayed alongside in greyed-out script the verb's infinitive. If the item is an adjective, you will see the gender of the item required. In the Related Words section you will see words which are related to the item displayed which will help relieve ambiguity and also give alternative meanings.

Mastering Items

When the score for an item reaches 6 it is declared "Mastered" and will not be displayed again in this session. Your overall score is shown at the bottom of the screen e.g. 4 items mastered out of 20 selected. If a word/phrase is well known to you, you may manually set it to "Mastered" so that it does not show again. Click the "Set to Mastered" button when the item is displayed.

Saving current selection

Should you need to suspend your session for any reason e.g. a meal break, you may save the current selection and the current scores by clicking the button labelled "Save selection and exit". Be aware that if the session "times-out" due to inactivity for 20 minutes the current selection will be lost as you will need to log-in again. Saved selections may be reactivated from the welcome screen after you log in. Click the link called "Continue Saved Selection". The testing process will continue from where you saved it.

Statistics

At any stage during the testing process you may view both current statistics (progress of current selection) or overall statistics (how you are progressing with Mastered items compared to all items in the database). Simply click Statistics on the menu bar.

All Items Mastered

When all items in your selection are mastered you will be presented with the Finish screen where you will be able to update the database with your Mastered items and continue to the next stage in the learning cycle. Please see the help associated with this screen for more information.

Listening to Pronunciation

You may listen to pronunciation of either foreign or native words at any time by clicking the appropriate speaker symbol.