Miskito/Layout

This page describes how to use the course's templates and conventions to produce each of the elements in a standard lesson of the course. For a general description of the structure of lessons, see the page on Lesson Structure.

Templates are used to generate the components. To learn more about how this is done, you may need to read Using the templates.

Point layout
The standard structure of a point (i.e. "teaching point" or "learning point", depending on the point of view) consists of three components: a model, a commentary and an exercise. These components appear on the page in the following layout: NB The three components are edited in the following sequence: model - exercise - commentary. This is because the exercise is contained in a template (called Mini_exercise) which floats it to the right automatically. (If the text of the commentary component is long enough it will "wrap around" the exercise at the bottom forming an L-shape.)

The sequence of templates in a typical point is as follows (CAPITALS represent variable template parameters):

==SECTION TITLE==

This results in the following:

SECTION TITLE

There can be any number of "comments" and "notes" in any relative order. The maximum length of each of these items is the paragraph. Other elements should generally be kept in the order shown.

The model component
The purpose and composition of model components is explained here in the Lesson Structure page.

The Miskito/Model template is used to create model components in the following way: For example, the following (from Lesson 1): produces this result:

Notice that the model sentences are laid out as a bulleted list, with key items (i.e. those being studied in this point) indicated in bold. The translation is presented in parallel fashion.

The exercise component
The purpose and composition of exercise components is explained here in the Lesson Structure page.

The Miskito/Mini exercise template is used to create exercise components in the following way: For example, the following (from Lesson 1):

results in:

Notice that this template automatically "floats" the whole exercise to the right hand side of the page. In edition, the exercise is placed immediately before the text that is to appear to its left (such as these lines), where the commentary will normally go.

The input items may be laid out as a bulleted or a numbered list. It is probably best to use bullets for short exercises (with few "questions") and numbers for longer ones (to facilitate comparison with the answers). The output items (or answers) are presented in the same format as the input.

The commentary component
The purpose and composition of commentary components is explained here in the Lesson Structure page.

The Miskito/Comment template is used to insert comments as follows: The Miskito/Note template is used to insert notes as follows: For example: results in:

The vocabulary component
Vocabulary components are described here in the Lesson Structure page.

The first step in laying out a vocabulary component from scratch is to create a table as follows: This produces a block of background colour onto which to superimpose the template elements (this is the function of the first and last lines). Secondly, it incorporates the Miskito/Vocab_head template, which consists of the darker horizontal bar of colour in the top right corner with the "Vocabulary" heading and room in the top right corner for instructions to be added if wished (the second line). The remaining lines divide the lower part of the table into three (still empty) cells of equal width from left to right. The lines of dots show where these cells are located.

The vocabulary, ordered alphabetically, will be split into three columns, and these columns will go in the places indicated by the rows of dots shown. For example, here is the vocabulary in (Lesson 1):

Each individual vocabulary item is entered by means of a Miskito/Vocab template, which looks like these (code on the left, result on the right):

in other words:

POS stands for "part of speech". We may choose not to give a POS by placing a blank space in the position for this field, as in the "aisiki" example. LINK stands for data to link the word to the lesson and section where it first appears; the format is:

LESSON#SECTION

where LESSON is a number and SECTION is the name of the section, as in the above examples.

The review component
Review components are desribed here in the Lesson Structure page.

Again, we begin by setting up a table as follows:

which produces:

where the dots indicate the body of the table. An instruction is placed here in the position marked by "INSTRUCTION". The body of the table is then filled with instances of the Review Template, one for each question, like this:

with the result:

A whole review exercise could then look like this:

for which the full code is as follows: