English With Us
(Continued from Page One)

Reviewed by Jun Da, Ph.D.
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Middle Tennessee State University

Other learning activities

The English With Us series offers three add-ons to help a user practice and improve his spoken English.

To help a user better understand the learning materials in the CD series, a meaning section is provided for each topic with notes on the situation as well as related cultural or social conventions. A user can click on each utterance and read the notes (where available) at his own pace. Translations of both the utterances and explanatory notes in Japanese, Chinese and Korean are provided at this stage to assist learner comprehension.

To improve a learner's accuracy, a word test section is provided on each conversational CD. A user is given an excerpt of the conversation and has to type in a proper word or phrase. A prompt with correct answer(s) will be provided after two unsuccessful attempts.

To reinforce a user's learning experience, a grammar section is available for detailed study of the materials related to the dialogues (such as language functions and structures). The grammar section is available on the separate grammar CD and is linked to from each of the conversational CDs. It contains notes and exercises on structures, functions, topics and communication techniques where both similar expressions and functions are grouped together to give students a better understanding of the particular learning point in question. Grammatical exercises are also available and come in the format of multiple choice question.

During a learning session, a user's performance is monitored and fed back to him/her through a simple scoring mechanism where accuracy is judged as a percentage of the questions to which he/she has responded correctly.

What I like most about the CD series

The English With Us series has three attractive features:

First, it successfully incorporates role play by allowing a user to take on different roles in a dialogue. In some cases, such as phone conversation, the conversational exchanges can follow different paths depending on the user's choice. Such flexibility in presenting interactive materials not only simulates real life situations but also brings challenge and fun to a user in engaging in meaningful communication.

Secondly, the meaning section on each CD contains explanatory notes on cultural or social conventions that form an important part of any communicative language learning. Knowledge of these cultural and social conventions will no doubt help students improve their communicative proficiency. At the same time, translations of the explanatory notes as well as the conversations themselves in Japanese, Chinese and Korean provide a useful means for students with those language background to learn the material in focus.

Lastly, the comprehensive grammar CD with lists of similar expressions, functions, structures and communicative techniques in one central location not only provides convenience to users during their learning session but also gives them a better overall perspective of the learning material in focus.

What needs to be improved

Designing interactive computer programs for practicing conversational English has never been an easy task. While the series uses a clever design to engage a learner in conversations through role play, there are a few pedagogical and technical issues that may affect the effectiveness of the series.

First, the CD series fails to present a clear statement of the learning objectives. The lack of such statements would make it difficult for a user to judge his progress or performance at the end of each learning session since he/she does not have anything to use as criteria for judgment (except the percentage scores that he/she obtains at the end of each topic).

Secondly, there is no function or button that would allow the user to listen to an uninterrupted playback of the entire episode of a dialogue. A continuous playback of the complete dialogue would give the user a better chance to observe a real life situation. Such observation is often the first and crucial step in language acquisition.

Lastly, the lack of an Exit button on each screen makes it inconvenient for a user to quit a learning session any time he/she wants. With the current design, a user has to navigate to the very beginning of each CD in order to exit. While the weakness in this navigation design will not impede the effectiveness of a learning session, it is a desirable feature that many users would expect to have.

Conclusion

The English With Us is an interesting series of interactive video that will help students practice conversational English. It is both engaging and fun to play. Given the speech rate and dialogue length, I think that the program is best suited for intermediate or advanced level ESL users, especially when they want a quick course to improve their oral fluency. With its translations of various components into Japanese, Chinese and Korean, the series should attract ESL learners with those language backgrounds.