French Listening Comprehension

Crash

Rosetta McLeod

CRASH COURSE By Rosetta McLeod The rapidly expanding market in educational software is reflected by the sheer variety of programs now being issued. While not all of them strike me as as being of great educational value, it is nevertheless heartening to note that some publishers are now prepared to experiment with new ideas in this area. One of the most exciting concepts is the See Hear range of programs from Softie, Systems, which provide audio material for the user to listen to through headphones while watching the screen. Each See Hear package come complete with a connection lead for a standard 1/4 inch stereo headphone socket, and other,types of lead, suitable for personal stereos for instance, are also available from Softlee. Using a stereo cassette deck, the tape is loaded into the computer in the usual manner, and the user will hear the instructions for the program through the headphones while the tape is actually loading. This is achieved by recording the spoken word onto one of the two tracks on the stereo tape, and putting the program onto the other track. Although the concept of audio-visual presentation in education is not new, Softlee are probably the first company to bring the whole idea within the reach bf the ordinary home-computer-user. From a teacher's viewpoint, the See Hear programs seem to me to have an extremely useful role to play in our quickly-changing educational system. Over recent years, teachers of both primary and secondary school children have become increasingly aware of the importance of teaching listening and talking skills as well as those of reading and writing. Indeed, future exams may actually test levels of competence in all four of these skills. At present, there is a dearth of materials specifically designed for teaching and assessing listening skills, and it would be valuable if the See Hear concept could be extended to cover a variety of subject areas. Tony Lee of Softlee Systems is very interested in developing software with a strong educational content, and hopes to add languages other than French to his range of programs. Another novel program is Worldwise - Nuclear Weapons from the Richardson institute for Conflict and Peace Research at Lancaster university. This program is not available in the shops, and can only be obtained from Lancaster University. Although it is therefore unlikely that the program will achieve any real commercial success, it is nevertheless good to know that, at last, minority interests are being catered for in the field of educational software. It seems, however, that it is only the small publishers who are beginning to wake up to the needs of the large number of people involved in education. They are realising that educational software should not be directed solely at children involved in the traditional areas of learning, but at people of all ages who have a wide range of different educational interests, let's hope the larger publishers will soon follow suit. FRENCH LISTENING COMPREHENSION 1 Producer: Softlee Systems Memory Required: 48K Retail Price: £6.50 (including connection lead) Age Range: Secondary school pupils to adult, with a basic knowledge of French This listening comprehension is one of the See Hear programs already described. The program contains three different sections, each with ten questions and of increasing levels of difficulty. The user will hear the instructions for use in French while the program is loading, although they are printed on the package in English too. In the first section, short snippets of conversations can be heard, and the task is to answer questions on who is speaking, where the speaker is, and what he is doing. Each time, the screen shows a choice of four possible answers, and the user must position the red band over the answer of his or her choice. One might, for instance, hear the contents of a shopping list, and have to decide if the speaker is in a cafe, a grocer's shop, a chemists's or a bakery. At the bottom of the screen, a green strip diminishes in length to show the amount of time remaining. Section Two contains short descriptions of various situations, followed by part of a conversation. This time, the user must select the correct reply from the options on the screen. One conversation is between a policeman and the witness to an accident, who is asked 'Was the lorry travelling too fast?' The final and most difficult section features a conversation and a story, each of which is heard twice. This time, the questions are also displayed a second time with the initial responses highlighted, so that the user can alter the answer given if he or she desires. If the user scores 16 or more out of a possible 30, the correct answers can then be displayed, with accompanying explanations, for the questions incorrectly answered or the user may choose to see just the number of each question he or she answered incorrectly, together with the answer chosen. This program definitely scores over the other language programs on the market because of the listening element. All the audio material is read clearly and at a sensible pace by two native French speakers, and the sound quality is very good indeed. COMMENTS Control keys: any key to move red band downwards to chose an answer, number keys to move it up Keyboard play: very responsive Use of colour: limited Graphics: none.