Software Evaluation #3--AccuTalk English

Suffer the Little Children

Title of Software: AccuTalk

Producer: Quote's Publications Co. Ltd. (Taiwan)

Target Students: Very disciplined Korean, Chinese, or Japanese children or teens. Other ethnicities may never get through the first ten minutes . . .

Proficiency level: Beginning to Intermediate

Description: By producing sounds in English from phonemes through words and sentences and requiring that the learner reproduce them, the program promises to teach pronunciation, intonation and expressions for mostly oriental learners. In addition, a testing unit is built into the program, so that even a non-native speaker could test the individual learning the language. Audiograms are used to evaluate pronunciation and intonation, and scores are provided for each.

Evaluation: "However, the process of studying pronunciation may be rather boring, learner should be patient and keep working because studying correct pronunciation is fundamental for studying English. Based on this, the learner will get surprising result upon studying intonation and expression."

This quote from the descriptive materials from the text sums it all up! It is bo-ring if not tortuous to sit through a session, where even native speakers have a hard time making 100
%. For those with the "sitzfleish" (ability to sit for long periods of time) of sufficiently motivated out of despair, this program may bring some little gain. Perhaps in the very young, whose myelin sheaths have not yet cut them off from native fluency, there could be some gain--but it's not fun! Do the kids even know what they are saying once they get to the word and sentence phase? Oh my, this seems to represent the worst of the "drill or kill" methodology of learning pronunciation, and has little built-in motivation.

The cute little boy featured in the film (part of the marketing material) at the phoneme stage, and later at the sentence stage is imitating the sounds, but does he even know what he is

saying? How much of his childhood is he giving up sitting there with an oversized headset at the computer? If he still believes in Santa Claus, he may well believe that the machine can grade his pronunciation.

No wonder some people hate language learning if they are forced to go through programs like this!