(Continued from Page One)

by Maggie Sokolik

Each screen has a menu bar with various tools and options. The Help function is a standard Windows Help program. This type of help is easy to navigate. Its strength is that it allows the user to annotate the help pages. This can be a very useful tool in language learning; it allows the insertion of extra notes about grammar, mnemonic devices to help remember verb forms, etc. (This tool should be used by more language teachers and students as a strategy for learning.)

• Vocabulary takes you to a glossary that toggles between a "global" option (the glossary for the entire program) and a local option (the glossary for the chapter you're working on).
• Grammar takes you to example sentences featuring the grammatical focus of the chapter.
• Phonetics takes you a page with explanations of the Russian sound system.
• Reference takes you to a miniature Russian grammar book, with lots of explanations about rules and grammatical forms. The reference grammar, like all the instructional material, is in English.
• Options gives you some choices in configuring the program.
• Pilot provides a map of the course and lets you jump around the program. However, it doesn't tell you where you've been.
• Next goes to the following screen.
• Pause gives you a break (but doesn't supply the coffee, as the icon might suggest).
• The Record and Stop buttons are available only on the activities where you are asked to repeat a word or phrase, or in the voice-matching activities (again, more on this later).
• Quit is an obvious choice. However, when you press it, it asks you "Do you really want to go out?" Similar oddities of English appear throughout the program. For example, after I got an entire activity wrong, it told me "Be careful further."

The other activities in the chapters include the typical audiolingual dialogues. These dialogues are written to showcase specific constructions or vocabulary items, rather than to present authentic speech. The dialogue appears in Cyrillic on the top of the screen, and at the bottom, in IPA and an English translation. You can replay them and repeat and record the parts of them, much like you would memorize and repeat dialogues in an audiolingual classroom.

As grammatical models, these dialogues serve a purpose. The sound quality is clear, so it is easy to hear the words and phrases as they are spoken. However, the dialogues present two weaknesses. First, they present language examples that seem to be at odds with what people might actually talk about. Take for example this dialogue from Chapter 15:

Apparently, the (adult) character had just been introduced to his parents.

A sample from a dialogue: "Do you study Russian?" (47K .aiff)

The second problem is the use of stereotyped characters. The women characters include a secretary and a housewife. The men are doctors, engineers, and interpreters. (There is one male secretary.) Given that nouns carry morphological markings indicating gender, this is more than just a point of political correctness. What is the word for businesswoman? Is the word for doctor the same, whether male or female? It wasn't clear to me.

Among the activities, there are fill-in-the-blank exercises focusing on grammar and vocabulary, and in some of these, the keyboard is mapped to the Cyrillic alphabet. (Stickers of the alphabet are included to put on the keys of your keyboard.) There are also two game-type activities: a card-matching game and a shooting gallery game. In the card-matching game, rows of cards with both English and Russian words on them are laid on a table. I bet 90 dollars that I could match 18 Russian words with their English translations. I matched 13 and lost my money. Then I skipped through several chapters and did just the card games. I found that this game had an unexpected outcome; although it seems to be intended as a translating activity, in fact, I found it much more useful for reading and recognizing the alphabet. The words or phrases on the cards are spoken as they are put on the table, and I found myself listening and trying to match what I heard with the words on the cards. This proved much more useful for improving my reading skills than any of the exercises that were more clearly structured as reading activities.

In the shooting gallery game, the "ammunition" is a word or sound spoken in Russian. A voice-print of my recorded word appeared next to the voice-print of a native speaker saying the same sound. The closer the prints were in form, the closer I got to the bulls-eye in the shooting gallery. This voice technology is motivating and interesting, though I found that it worked best when I spoke very loudly.

One of the strengths of the program is that there is variation in the activities among chapters. Some chapters might have two dialogues, while others have four. Some have typing activities, others don't. This lessens some of the monotony that occurs in programs where each chapter or unit is structured in exactly the same way as the previous one.

Another important feature of the program is its ability to track the learner's progress. A simple graph showed me which activities I had done, and how I had performed. However, there was no adaptive testing, or even suggestions about which language features I needed to study more. Even when I performed at a low success rate I was moved forward through the course, feeling less and less confident about my learning. And, the quizzes are short--five items in most cases--and so they don't cover a lot of ground. However, going back and reviewing, redoing exercises, is always a possibility, and highly recommended.

I did learn a little Russian with this program, and I'm sure if I continued to use it, I could learn a respectable amount of very basic Russian. This CD-ROM course would probably be more effective in combination with a traditional class. The dialogues weren't motivating enough to get me to record my own voice much, and the graphics and interactivity were not of sufficient quality to be interesting on their own (with the possible exception of the card game). Russian teachers shouldn't fear for their jobs yet.

After a few days with the Russian Tutor, I can now ask what something is, and I know the words for pen, coat, book, car, tape recorder, businessman, and engineer, among others. I understand more of the alphabet, and feel more confident that I could continue on and learn Russian in a classroom setting. And, although I don't yet feel prepared to return to the Baltic and buy caviar, I did find the answer to the red/black problem in the Russian Tutor's glossary: