English With Us

What do you do when you want to improve your spoken English but have no native speaker to turn to? English With Us is a CD-ROM series designed to help students speak English correctly and with confidence by practicing dialogues using interactive video.

The English With Us series consists of five CDs that contain interactive video for conversational English and one grammar CD with explanatory notes and exercises. The program is designed to simulate real life conversation with dialogue content selected to suit a work and social environment. The learner, after watching and listening to the video dialogue between two or three people, can interact with the characters on screen through a variety of learning activities such as role play and words/key phrases practices. There are two levels for each dialogue situation that offer different ways of saying the same thing--one at learning speed, the other at a native speaking speed. The series also contains translations in Japanese, Chinese and Korean and a range of accents, including British, Canadian, American and New Zealand.

A quick walk-through

Starting the program is as simple as inserting the CD into the CD player. The program will auto-start by itself. Just in case you have an older model of CD player, you can open the CD and click on, for example, the Start1.exe program on CD 1.

A typical learning session

To begin a learning session, a user has to log in. Both the user name and password are created by the user the first time when he/she logs in.

Once the user logs in, he/she is presented with a set of topics (such as greetings, and job interviews, etc.) to practice with. He/she can choose a topic at either of the two levels with Level 1 at learner speed and Level 2 the native speaker speed (which is harder).

Once the user selects a topic and the level, he/she is led to the submenu where he/she can choose between two different ways of participating in the conversation:

1) Acting as one of the participants in a dialogue--In this mode, the user can play either of the two (or three) roles in the conversation. To play the role, he/she is presented with a series of multiple choice questions that contain the utterances of a dialogue. He/she has to click on the right choice in order to keep the conversation going.

2) Playing both roles in a conversational exchange--Similar to the 'single' mode above, the user can keep the dialogue going by clicking on the proper utterances of both participants in turn.

Another way of acting as both participants in a conversation is for the user to type in the proper response at each conversational exchange rather than click on a series of multiple choice questions. Again, a conversation will continue only if he/she keys in the proper response. A 'Help' button is available just in case a student needs assistance in coming up with the correct answer.

System Requirements:
Multimedia PC

Windows9X/ME/NT/2000

Version Reviewed:
1.0

Price Info:
$5 for each demo CD (80% locked). Additional $30 for a full version.

Availability:
Commercial software available from the publisher.

Quick Summary:
The English With Us is an interesting series of interactive video that will help students practice conversational English. It is both engaging and fun to play. Given the speech rate and dialogue length, I think that the program is best suited for intermediate or advanced level ESL users, especially when they want a quick course to improve their oral fluency. With its translations of various components into Japanese, Chinese and Korean, the series should attract ESL learners with those language backgrounds.

Screen Capture:
(Click for larger image)

"Greetings" (35K jpg)