Focus on Grammar offers extensive grammar practice in the form of fairly traditional CALL exercises. The version reviewed here is the one intended for intermediate level students of English, which is the second of four levels available.

Following the instructions for installation in the user guide is easy enough and fast. Once the CD-ROM disk is in place, you're ready to start exploring within five minutes. After the program has been started, a window of fixed size appears, showing the title page. Clicking on it will reveal the opening menu where you are given a choice among four access options:

• start new workbook
• open existing workbook
• guest access
• quit

The menu that follows one of the first three choices is called the Unit Menu in the accompanying leaflet, but on a PC it's actually called the Part Menu, and on a Mac it's called the Part and Unit Menu (see below, Fig 1).

Fig 1: The Part Menu
(click for full-size view -- 35K gif)

This is how this screen always looks (even if you return to it from a unit which is not in the visible upper portion of this listing). On the PC you need to use a scrollbar to access the other units; on a Mac you use page forward and back buttons. The button "Appendix Menu" opens up a screen which displays a list of the 19 grammatical appendices, mostly lists of such things as irregular verbs; common participial adjectives; or common verbs followed by a gerund, etc. The button "User's Manual" gives access to various helpfiles of a more technical nature where the various exercise types and the menus are explained.

In order to start working on any exercises, one of the units has to be opened from this menu. On the PC, this has to be done by clicking first on the unit and then on the OK button, as double-clicking the unit will not work. (On a Mac, you can double-click on the unit names to open them.) Each of the 38 units opens with a screen that looks similar to the one shown on the right (Fig. 2). There are always the five sections:

• Discover the Grammar
• Practice
• Read
• Listen
• Write

with a number of exercises in each part, leading gradually from isolated, simple tasks to more complex ones.

The same screen also offers access to "Grammar Notes" and "Grammar Charts". Both of these help files are useful and well-suited to the particular units. Unfortunately, they did not get the benefit of any graphical treatment by a designer. They are pure text files, not editable by users, and some of them without enough margin around the text to make for comfortable reading. This part of the program could have been developed into something much more appealing if its visual appearance had been better taken care of.

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