SpadeK
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Group 6
Group 6 Marina, K, Ryan, Claire, Romina, Kacey
Title, Publishing date
CA Life, 2002
Target Audience/learners, English Proficiency Level
Grade School Students, Intermediate
Brief Description
The CD consists of 10 chapters; each chapter consists of 7 lessons. The English proficiency level will increase in each chapter. Each of the lessons serves their own purposes. The lessons are divided into Fiction, Non-fiction, Vocabulary, Editing, Grammar, Listening and Writing.
Fiction and Non-fiction are classified in the reading section, while Vocabulary, Editing, and Grammar are classified in the activity section. Listening is somewhat similar to Writing because you would have to first listen to the text and then type out what you have heard. Writing is completely based upon your own creativity.
Design
The design of the program is quite cute and the images are bright and colorful. The functions of the CD are relatively simple and buttons are direct and easy to use. It is quite suitable for grade school students. When you first enter the program, you will see in front of you colorful picture of a city, with the highway in the middle of it. The highway is split into 10 sections, which are the 10 chapters that the learners will learn from. When you click upon of the sections of the highway, it will transfer you into another screen. This screen will consist of the seven units that the learners would practice their reading, vocabulary, grammar, listening and writing.
Below are the designs of each unit.
Fiction, Non-fiction: It has a colorful short animation on the right, and its text on the left. There are arrows under the text that will allow the learner to flip to the next page, in doing so; the text and the short animation will change to the next page. This is function is convenient if the learner unfortunately forgotten what the content of the previous page.
Editing: They will have boxes with incorrect word tense in them, and to correct these answers you must type in the correct spelling or tense in the word box that is below the text.
Vocabulary: This activity will have vocabulary at the top of the screen so that you are able to pull the vocabulary to the match the white boxes, which are in incomplete sentences to complete it.
Grammar: This activity is very similar to the Vocabulary activity with an exception that the focus is on grammar.
Listening: This activity is presented in a book-like manner, it will have picture to the left side of the screen and to the right side, and there will be an area where you could type in your answer. The computer will begin to read aloud once without stopping, and the second time, will pause after every sentence. There is a replay button at the bottom left side of the program, so that if the learner is unclear of the content that they can listen to it once more.
Writing: This program is presented with an area that the learner is able to type in. At the bottom of the screen there are five colorful stars where serve as hints to writing a story, there is a compre button at the bottom right hand corner, which will reveal the program’s version of a story, so that the learner is able to compare.
Content (Presentation/Interaction)
The CD-Rom is based on a presentation form, where the information is given out accordingly to the learner, where the learner will have limited interaction with the computer. In most all of the lessons, the computer will act accordingly to their pace and is not controllable by the student. This feature is most obvious during the listening activity. This action shows moderate control on the computer’s behalf which shows that this is a moderate teacher control program. The student must listen to the given content at the given speed. But the student has the choice to stop the program whenever they feel like it.
Potential Effectiveness (Theories)
In the Reading area of the fiction and non-fiction, the top-down model is used. The content given to the learner has a relatively low level of explanation, which forces the learner to guess what the context is about.
In the non-fiction area especially, is more focused upon the content schemata. Everything in the text was related to the background of the fiction story. The linguistic schemata is used from time to time, only explaining specific wording, (mainly vocabulary), while the formal schemata has been somewhat overlooked.
In the Editing, Vocabulary, Grammar exercises, they were all trying to fulfill the requirements of Krashen’s Monitoring Model’s affective filter hypothesis. These three lessons where form in to types of games in order to lower the learner’s affective filter, though it was designed to do so, we are not certain that it has succeeded in doing so. In order to lower the affective filter, the program added a slight factor of Total Physical Response (TPR) to their games. The learner basically shoots down the correct answer, so the learner would have to coordinate their hands and eyes in order to accomplish the objective of the program.
The Editing and Vocabulary assignments are somewhat similar, both supporting Krashen’s Acquisition-learning hypothesis. The programs will respond to the wrong answer(s) by giving the learner a second chance in guessing for the correct answer, and by continuously aiding their errors by giving them corrections after a limited amount of mistakes made by the learner. .
The listening activity includes the Top-down process by giving them some basic knowledge of this activity. The learner’s main focus should be mainly upon the content and meaning of the text. This way the learner would be concentrated more upon the meaning instead of the form.
The writing activity applies Krashen’s input hypothesis by giving the learners some types of hints, to be able to understand the meaning. Learners are to create a story of their own, and if they are lost for ideas, then they are able to rely upon the hints for more information. This allows the learner to have clearer objective and to elaborate this objective. Thus giving them the i+1 of the input hypothesis, the hint as i and +1 is their own elaboration.
The basic downsides of this CD are mainly the restrictions, and the listening. There goal for the learners are to find a gold key within every lesson. But unfortunately the learners need not to complete the lessons in order to find the gold key. All they need to do is to exit from that lesson, and the computer will naturally give them the gold key, leading very little restrictions to make sure the learner goes through the lessons thoroughly and then exit every lesson.
The second main downside is the listening activity, the learner may only listen to the text at the speed of the computer, and must wait to listen to the specific words that he/she is not familiar with. Because the replay button causes the computer to go through the entire story once more, and not go through specific sentences. This may cause the learners’ frustration and may cause the learner to not want to listen to the text a second time.
Aside these downsides, the CD is relatively good, so we would give the CD a rate of 7.
Last edited by SpadeK, 12/12/2004, 8:16 am
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