Zigzag Reader is a computerized tool for evaluating, instantly, comprehension and fluidity in reading and writing.

Zigzag Reader is a flexible tool that allows the teacher to build reading and writing activities that suit his / her own teaching materials and his / her own teaching objectives.

Zigzag Reader is a tool that can be used with beginning reader-writers in the primary grades just as it can be used with more advanced reader-writers at the high school or collegiate level. What's great is that, for the same text, it is possible to generate a variety of reading and writing activities, ranging from very simple to much more complex.

Zigzag Reader, despite its name, can also serve as a learning and evaluation tool for certain writing processes, especially concerning such thorny issues as homophony, among many others.

Zigzag Reader is a learning tool that seeks to develop automaticity in language, whether it concerns the first or second language. The Zigzag technique focuses the reader's attention and forces a constant self-evaluation of the text comprehension, and in so doing, forces the student to adopt a self-checking strategy.

Zigzag Reader allows the teacher to segment a text (i.e. a word, a few words, a sentence, …) and to couple these segments with distractors of his / her choice (homophone distractors, antonym distractors, etc.). Thanks to an electronic dictionary including about 150 000 written forms of English, generating such tests is automatic and can be done in the span of a few seconds.

Zigzag Reader allows the teacher to build his / her own comprehension questions (i.e. multiple-choice, true or false) and to add them at any location in the text.

Zigzag Reader is a package containing three applications:

• Zigzag Generator: for generating reading and writing activities;
• Zigzag Test: for using the texts and activities in the classroom, both for pedagogical and evaluation objectives, and with the possibility for immediate qualitative feedback;
• Zigzag Calculator: for comparing, instantly - without time-consuming computerized procedures - a reader-writer group's results, and for viewing these results based on the criteria selected by the teacher.

Innovations in version 2

Psychopedagogical basis for
Zigzag Reader