If you are an ESL/EFL teacher and you haven't heard of the Azar series of grammar texts, you may be unique. Prentice-Hall has been selling this series for eons it seems, and has recently introduced a companion CD-ROM. And although the CD contains good (at least for those who believe in analyzing grammar) and sometimes amusing contextualized activities, many students and teachers may balk at the $175USD price.

To operate the CD for the first time, I had to go through an installation process, which enables several items to be installed: QuickTime 2.5, Acrobat 3.0, and QuarkImmedia Viewer. I chose 'custom' installation and installed the QuarkImmedia Viewer only. I already had Acrobat 4 and QuickTime 4; I didn't want to chance the EasyInstall as I feared having my newer software versions replaced with the older ones!

This is my first experience with the QuarkImmedia Viewer, and I was suitably impressed with its interactivity. Version 1.03 worked just fine on my PowerMac. I don't believe QuarkImmedia is as robust as Asymetrix ToolBox, Macromedia Director, or Authorware, but for the simple interactions included on the CD it gets the job done (you can get more information about this player at the QuarkImmedia website).

The CD contains 50 grammar topics. These mirror the 'hard copy' of Azar texts, and the PDF print-outs are actually grammar charts lifted directly from the books. These files must be printed, as they are nearly impossible to read on the computer screen. The instructions to print are given on-screen, and on paper the charts are handy reference material, but if you have the textbook already, there's not really much point in printing them.

Question types are the usual multiple choice, click-and-drag, and fill-in-the-blanks. All the students I observed using the CD had no trouble figuring out what to do with the keyboard or cursor, as well as navigating from lesson to lesson. For the type-in answers, the standard 'pressing the return or enter key to get your answer' clears what is typed, a minor inconvenience easily adjusted to.

The 100 minutes of audio is a helpful addition to the CD. For each sentence, you can click on the speaker button to listen to the completed sentence, thus getting the answer aurally. Then you can complete the question, or if you are really stuck, get the answer by clicking on the exclamation mark at the end of each sentence. All the answers are easily revealed, and a reset button allows you to start over at any time.

Many sections also have a recorded conversation, though these are usually accompanied by only two or three matching or multiple-choice questions. If there is perhaps one shortcoming of the CD, it is this. A whole section of comprehension questions could have been devoted to the listening segments. Item types such as dictation (listen and type what you hear) and prediction (listen to the four choices...) could test comprehension processes in listening. To be fair, however, the CD concentrates on grammatical structure, and it does that adequately enough. And the quality of the sound is excellent for 8-bit audio.

Title:
Azar Interactive: A Multimedia Grammar Experience

Authors:
Howard Beckerman with Charts & Exercises by Betty Schrampfer Azar

Price Info:
$177.50 USD at Amazon.com

Single Copy: 0-13-862103-9
US$ 175.00

5-Pack: 0-13-793043-7
US$ 787.53

10-Pack: 0-13-793050-X
US$1540.00

20-Pack: 0-13-793068-2
US$2730.00

Demo Disk: 0-13-079650-6
Free of charge

Quick Summary:
Although the CD contains good (at least for those who believe in analyzing grammar) and sometimes amusing contextualized activities, many students and teachers may balk at the high price.

Online Demonstration:
A RealVideo demonstration is available from the publishers website.

Screen Shots:
Click on the thumbnail images throughout the article to view full size screen shots from the program.