Welcome to CrowLL - a crowdsourcing game that helps develop teaching materials!

Your participation is really important! By playing the game, you’ll be helping to build a collection of many authentic sentences for English teachers and materials developers (including people who make dictionaries!).

How do you play?

If you like to judge, you can play level 1 and identify which of two sentences you don’t consider suitable for teaching English.

If you like to categorise, you can play level 2 and select what category or categories better describe the type of problem a sentence has.

If you like to mark, you can play level 3 and show which parts of the sentence contain a problem. 

If you like to do more than one thing, you can combine the levels!

How does the game work?

You'll receive points every time your selection matches the selection made by another player. You’ll also receive points for consecutive plays. 

As you reach certain scores- you’ll receive badges 🙂.

Our goal is to reach 10.000 sentences. When England reaches X sentences, voted on by 3 people, each member of England’s team will receive a bonus of 100 points - whether the players are online or not.

Can England beat the other countries in the game? Keep an eye on the International Competition leaderboard to see where your country stands.

Why CrowLL?

Imagine you are an English teacher and you are browsing the internet to find real example sentences for your lesson. You want to show your students how a verb is used, or help them understand the meaning of a word based on its context, or you want to create grammar drilling exercises. 

You’ll see that this search can take a very long time! For example, you'll need to take your time when selecting phrases to assess whether they contain sensitive content, offensive language or spelling/grammar mistakes.

We want to create a free collection of many authentic sentences for English teachers and materials developers so that they don’t need to browse the internet to find examples for their lessons. But since we know that  every lesson and teaching context is different, we want to collect as many sentences as possible, including those containing potentially problematic content, and let the teachers/materials developers decide what they want to use.

Who created CrowLL?

This project is an international cooperation between researchers from the Research Centre for General and Applied Linguistics at University of Coimbra (CELGA-ILTEC), in Portugal, the Dutch Language Institute (INT) in Leiden (Netherlands), the Centre for Language Resources and Technologies, University of Ljubljana (CJVT), in Slovenia, Ruppin Academy Centre, in Israel, and the Institute of the Estonian Language (EKI), in Estonia. It originated in the context of the enetCollect COST Action (CA16105).

You can learn more about the project here.

Consent

This project has been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Ruppin Academic Center (study 208).

Your responses will be anonymised. No one will be able to identify you or your answers, and no one will know whether or not you have played this game. The data will be kept securely in the server of the University of Coimbra and will be used for research purposes only.

By signing up, you confirm that you have read the above information, agree to data handling policy, voluntarily agree to participate and are 18 years of age or older.