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Eurocentres teachers have used Wida's authoring programs and created ready-to-go library disks for almost all levels, elementary to advanced, concentrating on vocabulary, grammar practice, etc, but also exam practice including TOEFL. There are 35 disks in all. 27 of the titles are available in Macintosh format (contact the publisher for details). Windows version due out in February 1999; that will be called the Eurocentres CALL Library for English. These packages are now sold by Wida.
Uses Wida's Gapmaster program to offer a range of practice materials for English for Academic Purposes students. 21 exercises work on finding the missing words, word building, finding and correcting mistakes in a text, answering questions about a written text, and analyzing data in a table. A student workbook, teacher's manual, and learner's manual are included.
Designed for new immigrants to Canada, this uses multiple choice quizzes, typing and dragging exercises, and database searches on health, job search, vocabulary, grammar, literacy, and life skills topics. Minimum hardware requirements: 286 IBM/compatible, color monitor, mouse. Site license for $600.
Stories can be read in English, French, or Spanish. Students can record and play back their voices while pronouncing any of the 1311 words in the story. They can also sing along to the story's song and create and their own stories with graphics. A teacher's manual is included, with lesson plans, worksheets, and blackline masters. Requires CD-ROM drive.
HyperCard authoring program for creating dictations from music CDs. Teacher plays a song, marking relevant segments. She then types in (or copies and pastes) the lyrics corresponding to those segments. The student's job is to type in the lyrics (or part of the lyrics) as she is listening to the song on the CD. If she's correct, the song continues playing. Interesting use of hypermedia in a widely available medium, but fairly hardware-intensive and time-consuming to prepare. Teachers are advised to get students to do as much of the preparatory work as possible, e.g. picking music and typing in lyrics for each other. (JM) Our teachers have created a number of these, and students enjoy them a great deal. (DH)
A thematic science curriculum on the Cell for K-6 classrooms in English and Spanish. Requires a CD-ROM drive. Students play the computer-based game ÒWhatÕs alive?,Ó learn about magnification (The program comes with a microscope and pre-stained slides.), learn about cells from the scientists who first developed microscopes and discovered cells (Anton can Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke), and design ÒnewÓ cells based on what theyÕve learned in the lessons.
Teaches and tests a wide range of skills covering all Learning Outcomes at Levels 2, 3 and 4 of the Reading and Writing, Oral Communication and Numeracy and Mathematics Streams of the Australian CGEA test. Australian English.
This HyperCard stack by Elizabeth Hanson-Smith, Cinny Cowgill, and Trang Nguyen offers students a quiz on the characters in Charlotte's Web. A reference button allows students to look up names of the characters.
Children's Classics features a multilingual format, in two modes: one where students listen to native speakers; and one where students read the story and choose to record/replay their voices. Switch easily among English, French, German, and Spanish. Also features built-in glossary plus writing activities. Exciting games with each story, sequencing, concentration, and multiple choice. Stories include Jack and the Beanstalk, Pinocchio, and Peter Pan. CD-ROM.
Produces multiple choice tests with feedback for right and wrong answers. Now included in Wida's Authoring Suite. Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT supported.
This program by Martin Holmes enables teachers to create multiple-choice quizzes which students can do on the computer. Hints can be included as feedback to student responses, and quizzes can be done as timed tests or with no time limit. At the end of each quiz, the student receives a percentage score. (This is a sister program for ClozeMaker, with a very similar interface.) Freeware.
Download this free software program from http://www.churchillhouse.com/english/downloads.html to help students revise for the tricky "spot the error" question on the Cambridge First Certificate Exam (FCE). It's also suitable for intermediate and advanced students who want to work on their grammar.
This CD-ROM is a interactive database of 19,000+ movie titles. It includes Quicktime clips from actual films, reviews, cinematographic descriptions, biographies and photographs of actors, summaries of plots, Academy Award lists, and a wealth of other information. All the data is easily searchable in several ways and connected with hypertext links. Of particular utility in language learning are the audio segments of dialog from many films; learners can read the accompanying text, but they cannot listen and read the text at the same time. Intended for use in a content-based course on film for University-level ESL students. Also good for teachers and students who want to add clips to multimedia presentations.
This CD-ROM-based program uses text, graphics, and audio to help learners prepare for the written and oral portions of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Citizenship Test. Students learn about US history and government in preparation for the test. They can listen to questions and record their answers for later review. Quizzes are included so students can check their understanding. The program requires a sound card, microphone, and headset. Lab pack of 5 is $590, of 10 is $885; a network version is $1180. A demo is on the TESOL/CELIA CD-ROM.
The strength of this program is in the way students must link their own game-playing strategies with the way that inventions and technology might have been discovered and developed: you can't have literature without writing, and you can't have writing without the alphabet; and this applies all the way up to building a space-station. Students obtain knowledge through reading about the developments on screen (the file that creates them can be edited easily if required). One thing that I and a colleague (who used the game in a larger context) agree on is that the most important factor is the recording of information by the students as they play. He also gets them to write a summary of the day's play. I asked mine to copy the screens as they appeared. Effective for group work or individual play. Before teachers use the program they should run it several times themselves but should be careful as it is addictive. I would also recommend a companion book (unavailable here): Wilson, Johnny L. and Alan Emrich. Sid Meier's Civilization: or Rome on 640k a day. Prima Publishing: California, 1992.
Tutorial to teach students how to do a class newspaper. Includes brainstorming, grammar, editing, layout, and reporting skills. Available on CD-ROM or disk; includes teacher's guide, 30 student workbooks, and electronic newspaper templates.
A comprehensive, network-based management program that includes a range of software by grade level. Not designed specifically for ESL. Pricing depends on the number of stations on the network and extent of the software purchased. Basic packages start around $20,000.
Also sold as Speech Works from Trinity Software, this pronunciation CD-ROM offers a variety of exercises for practice. Learners can select lessons by their native language or see all the lessons. Learners can listen, record, and review words, phrases, and sentences. There is a technical vocabulary component, so learners in different disciplines can practice field-specific vocabulary. The focus is more on sounds than on stress and intonation, though those lessons are also included. There is no difference in the two products as far as I can see. (DHealey)
Click into English, designed by the Adult Multicultural Education Service in Australia, is designed for intermediate and advanced students who have to tackle different text types in their work or study. The selection and sequencing of the content in the CD follows a genre-based methodology: the presentation of a model text, with certain features highlighted, is followed by practice activities and an assessment. CD-ROM.
This lesson is based on excerpts from one of the Presidential debates with B. Clinton, G. Bush and R. Perot. Its focus is on listening comprehension, though there are a fair amount of reading, writing and discussion elements to boot. It is designed to play on any Macintosh computer running system 6 or higher, with QuickTime (a freeware extension) installed and 4 Mb of free RAM. A 12 inch monitor set to display 256 colors would be nice, though not essential. This is a freeware lesson suitable for use in a language lab with a teacher (though it can be modified for self-access study). Worksheets are provided in Word and Teach Text format.
A cloze generating program in which students fill in vowels, consonants, or words in a reading passage. A number of short texts are provided and teachers may add passages into the program for students to do.
This program from Martin Holmes enables teachers to create cloze (gap-fill) exercises which students can do on the computer. Clozes can be created by automatic gapping of every nth word in a text, or by selecting words to be removed. Students can do the exercises as timed tests or with no time limit, and students may choose to see a list of the missing words, or the complete text of the cloze if they wish. At the end of each quiz, the student receives a percentage score. (This is a sister program for Choices, with a very similar interface.) Freeware.
Practice for beginners in recognizing the value of (US) coins and bills. The ESL version includes a set of disks in Spanish as well as in English. This program is also sold as part of the Heartsoft Bestseller package.
This CD-ROM integrates the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, Collins COBUILD English Usage, and Collins COBUILD English Grammar, together with a Word Bank containing 5 million words selected from the Collins COBUILD Bank of English corpus. It has over 70,000 references and over 90,000 real examples and over 2,000 usage points with thousands of real examples.
This contains the Collins Pocket Bilinguals (French, German, Spanish, Italian) and a computer-based version of the COBUILD ESL Student's Dictionary that can be accessed from within any word processing program. Students can highlight a word either in a reading assignment entered by the teacher or while word processing and jump immediately into the dictionary to check its meaning or spelling. A five CD-ROM pack is $200, a ten-user license (1 CD-ROM, all dictionaries) is $350.00, and the Collins On-Line Network Utility (required to run Collins On-Line from a network server) is $150.
Learners interact with people in different settings in the virtual community of Cornerstone. They can take trips to the airport, supermarket, library, museum, bank, bus station, and other common locations around town. They will need tasks set by a teacher, however, for language learning benefit.
Complete works of Shakespeare plus the American Heritage Dictionary, study notes, sample tests, and essay questions. On CD-ROM.
A CD-ROM based encyclopedia, which is notable for its ease of navigation and quality of articles, which are written at 10th grade reading level. Its multimedia elements are somewhat uneven--the charts and photos are excellent comprehension aids, the digital movies and sounds aren't as helpful. Good introduction to research skills, even for lower level proficiency students. The Windows version has one feature that is definitely worth looking into. It's called Editing Room and it's basically a multimedia report writing option. Students can take pictures, videos, animations, sound, and even create narration to develop a multimedia slide presentation of their research findings. There are sample shows on the disk which give students ideas for things they can create. It's a great deal considering you get the encyclopedia with all of its images and sounds and this multimedia report writer on one disk. (Magoto)
This lesson is based on a TV news report about an actual computer camp for kids in Santa Clara, California. (I have gotten permission from the Assistant News Director at the network to use the lesson in my own classes, at presentations, and to distribute it to other teachers as freeware, e.g., over the Internet). It includes a QuickTime control bar for the sound which is synchronized to a color slide-show of key images from the report and a scrolling text field in which the learners type their answers. Handouts are provided in Word and Teach Text format. They include comprehension questions, a cloze exercise, highlighted vocabulary, and a complete transcript -- together with b/w images taken from the report. The lesson will run on any Mac running system 6 or 7 with 4 Mb (or more) of free RAM and with QuickTime installed. A color monitor (14 inches or bigger) or a PowerBook display are also necessary.
Text analysis and concordance software. Powerful and flexible program. You can download a 30-day trial from the website at http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/.
This program focuses on suprasegmentals, the most current approach to pronunciation teaching. It uses 27 video clips with 9 different speakers with a range of accents. A wide range of activities includes oral and visual feedback and some speech recognition. Three levels: lower intermediate, intermediate, and advanced are provided. This is helpful, since many pronunciation products use vocabulary that is far too difficult and uncommon for any but advanced students. North American, Australian, and British versions sold separately. See a full review at http://calico.org/CALICO_Review/review/conspeech00.htm.
This Hypercard-based tutorial is designed to prepare upper intermediate and advanced ESL students for success in academic writing courses. The focus of the instruction is on identifying topic sentences, understanding the structure of topic sentences, the function of supporting sentences, the use of transition words and phrases, and common paragraph organization patterns in English. The example texts used in the tutorials are short and generally relevant to student interests. New color version available. A black and white version is available through CELIA.
This program is a comprehensive approach to reading and language development. In the first phase, students see, hear, say, and record each word. The second phase is a reading of the lesson text, 2-3 sentences per screen. The same text is then presented in a timed reading exercise, one phrase at a time. Next the student completes reading comprehension exercises. Students can refer back to the text to find the answer, and on an incorrect response the computer highlights the sentence where the answer should have been found. For vocabulary practice, students complete words from sentences in the text and choose the correct spelling. Directions are spoken in English and Spanish. This is sold separately or as part of the ESL/Basic Literacy bundle.
These collections are to be used with a concordancer, such as MonoConc or MicroConcord, which lets you search large text libraries for all occurrences of a word. This is an excellent way of dealing with many questions which arise out of corrections of written work, such as 'What is the difference between first and at first?' or '..I don't care and I don't mind?' Collection A taken from 'The Independent' newspaper; Collection B taken from OUP publications.
Authoring program for creating interactive computer training programs with sound, graphics and movies, without scripting or programming. Programs can automatically track and save student reports. Course Builder Cross Platform converts Course Builder programs created on the Mac for playback on Windows. Programs cannot be created on Windows, however. More features are available in more expensive versions.
Designed for native speakers, this includes video clips, text, and graphics about 'America's Race to Build the Atomic Bomb.' CD-ROM
Using a realistic, yet fun visual format this geography simulation lets students take on the role of a long distance truck driver. Students make decisions about finding and delivering in a timely fashion up to 52 different commodities to 180 cities. Students need to read maps, calculate distances, estimate expenses, and plan cost-effective routes from coast to coast. The program and accompanying teacherÕs manual offer many possibilities for ESL/EFL communicative language practice through cooperative learning tasks. Also available: Cross Country California and Cross Country Texas in Macintosh disk format. Mac/Windows CD-ROM. Demo version is on the TESOL/CELIA CD-ROM and available on the publisher's website.
Using a realistic, yet fun visual format this geography simulation lets students take on the role of a long distance truck driver. Students make decisions about finding and delivering in a timely fashion up to 52 different commodities to 180 cities. Students need to read maps, calculate distances, estimate expenses, and plan cost-effective routes from coast to coast. The program and accompanying teacherÕs manual offer many possibilities for ESL/EFL communicative language practice through cooperative learning tasks. Also available: Cross Country California and Cross Country Texas in Macintosh disk format. Demo version is on the TESOL/CELIA CD-ROM. CrossCountry USA is now downloadable from the company's website (requires credit card) or on CD-ROM.
Crossword puzzle maker. Includes a thesaurus to help in generating clues. This package received several recommendations and was praised for being easy to use, though it helps to read the documentation in order to take advantage of all the features. Puzzles can be solved on screen, printed out, or exported to a word-processor.
CD-ROM version of one of the original crossword puzzle generators. Has multilingual capability. Crosswords can be played onscreen or printed out.
Students can listen to clues or read them onscreen. Comes with 100 puzzles and authoring capability. Can use colors and fonts to differentiate clues and subjects. Puzzles can be solved on-screen or printed out. Requires Windows and a sound card.
1996 catalog plus demos of Insight (job choices) and Postcards. Requires Acrobat Reader. CD-ROM.
The full series includes software, teacher’s manual, books for independent reading, onsite training and installation, CD- and Web-delivered professional development and technical support. Reading is taught through exercises working on vocabulary, phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency and comprehension.
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