January 2007 — Features
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ESL Technologies :: The Universal Language
The line is billed as “a complete, interactive, multimedia, customizable curriculum.” It includes ELLIS Kids, for young learners at three English-proficiency levels (preliterate, beginner, and low intermediate); and ELLIS Academic, for students 12 and older. (ELLIS Business for working adults is also available.)
ESL SOFTWARE: Creating a virtual world.
As Pearson puts it, “Learners experience a virtual world, using and speaking English.” Depending on the level of play, the programs offer interactive role-playing, context-sensitive translation, grammar, vocabulary, cultural insight, pronunciation and comparison tools, mastery tests, and skills-tracking features.
For Rosetta Stone, one of the bigger players in the electronic language-instruction business, context is key. The company’s programs serve as a medium for a teaching model known as Dynamic Immersion, in which the learner’s native language—whatever it may be—is never used for explanation or translation.
“In effect, we create an environment and set of processes that mimic the way you learned your first language,” explains Duane Sider, the Harrisonburg, VA-based company’s director of learning. “The environment provides native speakers, real texts, and thousands of real-life images. We introduce you to words in the new language, not by defining them with words in another language, but with the objects and events themselves. You acquired your native language by linking it to objects and events in the world around you, so it’s a process you already know.”
Rosetta Stone imbues its ESL programs, which are available on CD and on the web, with the same emphasis on this immersion model. Sider believes that ESL technologies should do more than simply provide materials to help the students practice and reinforce what their teachers have already taught. “That’s what we see, by and large, in the classroom,” he says. “But we believe that language-learning technologies should teach. They should be able to partner with the teacher in the classroom to provide genuine instruction.”
Deemphasizing the Teacher
The use of language-learning tools allows teachers to step back a bit from their ELL students, to act more often as facilitators in the learning process, says veteran ESL teacher Judie Haynes of Cherry Hill School, a K-6 school in River Edge, NJ. “Computer technology has revolutionized the way I teach,” she says. “Everything isn’t teacher-directed. My kids are doing research, working with content vocabulary, and writing. They come into class and get carried away. We look up and it’s time for them to leave. I practically have to force them out of the room.”
