SOFTWARE REVIEW
English With Us by Romus Interactive
English With Us is an interactive multimedia CD ROM for ESL students. It uses well designed video and sound to teach grammar points and vocabulary through a dialogue between two people. Students are guided through eight lessons, each with a number of tasks to be completed, and at two levels of English - beginner and elementary. The attractive box pack includes a teacher/student handbook which has transcripts of the conversations as well as additional exercises for students to do before and after using the computer.
Translations in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean at the back, and the subject matter of the dialogues, give a clear indication as to the target audience, that is to say Pacific Rim businessmen and women wanting to impress clients with some basic English skills. On that level the CD ROM works well and the New Zealand based Romus Interactive have produced a ground-breaking computer learning tool for the ESL classroom.
Each lesson has a number of components including video pairs work, cloze exercises, and built in timing and scoring. I particularly liked the ability to listen to a section of dialogue, and if you are equipped with a suitable sound card and microphone, record and playback your own voice repeating the passage.
I did find on the downside that some of the sound clips were difficult to hear due to technical sloppiness in the multimedia authoring stage of the production. Video editing at times had more in common with home movies than a professional piece of software. A further gripe was that the written dialogues for the cloze exercises did not always match what was said in the video soundtrack which could lead to confusion. For example, the characters might say "Ah!" or "Well!" during a sentence which is not reproduced in the screen text. These are relatively minor problems, however, which Romus will presumably work out in future releases.
What the CD ROM is short on is variety - the tasks
remain the same from lesson one to eight. This will not present
a problem for the well-motivated business executive, but the 11-16
year olds I field tested the software on were less patient and
concentration soon wavered. Older students, however, will find
the package a useful edition to any ESL program and an excellent
way to study alone at their own pace. At $99 English With Us
will appeal to the business market or ESL schools looking to offer
multimedia-based learning.
Andy Cox
Contact Information:
Normal Price US$99.95 + freight
Special Internet price for ordering on-line US$80.00
+ freight
View information and Order on-line at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Romus
Also free demo file, Language Lab working file to
download from:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Romus
and there is a Win a CD-ROM competition.
For further information, contact
Romus Interactive
PO Box 6156
Wellesley Street
Auckland
New Zealand
Tel: +64 2 1630799
Fax: +64 2 1787799