Software Evaluation

1. General Description

(1). Name of Software or Web Resource

Imagine Learning English

(2). Description of what the program or resource is and what it is designed to do

Imagine Learning English is a program that is designed for children whose English language proficiency is at the beginning level. It combines interesting content, new technology, music and art in the activities, which can change the situation that children will face when they start to learn a new language. It is designed to “develop the English learners’ vocabulary, listening and speaking, phonemic awareness, emergent literacy and school readiness”. And the goal of the program is to narrow the gap between the higher achieved students and the English learners.

(3). Language proficiency level targeted

Early-intermediate English learners

(4). Age range targeted

Ages 4-7

(5). Description of activities

This program contains several kinds of activities to improve children’s English. It uses words and graphics matching, wordbook, creating personal scene with the words learned before, coloring a black and white picture and reteaching the words with the assistant of the learners’ native languages in the vocabulary development. Then in the listening and speaking part, it uses practicing phrases after hearing and seeing the authentic speech, conversation and scene matching, singing a song, listening to simple stories and answering questions after that. It also uses videos of modeling the pronunciation of the phonemes, putting sounds together to make a word, learning the letters of alphabet through a song, a game to identify the words to practice the listening and speaking.

2. Evaluation

(1). Technological Features

Speed of program operation

According to the demo, the program runs quite well;

Reliability operation

Based on the demo, this program is reliable;

Screen management and user interface

The screen of the program is user-friendly, attractive, and is also easy

to operate;

Exploitation of computer potential:

As the demo shows, the program is quite interactive—with the computer. Almost all the activities are done through computers. And only through computers, it can be attractive for students age from 4-7. Those videos, animations, graphic, songs are all the stuff that made a great help in teaching a language. However, this program is only suitable at the areas where school or families can afford computers.

(2). Activities (Procedure)

This programs contains some different kinds of games, and uses animations and pictures to practice listening and speaking, so it collaborative with language skills. For example, the students will match the graphics of some characters with the shadows of those characters, and the computer will read the words when the click those graphics. Or there’s another example that the students choose different colors to complete a black and white picture, the computer will also read the name of the color when the students click the color. However, there are also tutorials of phoneme; letters of alphabets and pronunciation, and the phrases learning is using videos with authentic conversations, so it is also Instructional with linguistic focus and sociolinguistic focus.

(3). Teacher Fit (approach)

If I will teach students age from 4-7, I want to use this program to assist my teaching. It includes different kinds of activities, which I think is sufficient for kids at those ages. Thegrammaticality is fit the kids’ level, right for beginners. And the demo also shows one activity that is for learning phrases which are used daily, like “do you like it”, “can you help me” or “thank you”. What’s good is that, those phrases are taught through video clips of authentic conversations. That makes children be more aware of when and how those kinds of phrases will be used. Moreover, most activities involve fictional characters, like an ant or a talking microphone, which show no gender bias. And this program is not only easy for teachers to install and maintain, but also make effective and one on one instruction for the students. Imagine a teacher with a big class, how can every student get the personal instruction from the teacher? I’m not saying this program is better than teacher, at least, in that situation, students will know better.

(4). Learner Fit (Design)

To evaluation the Learner fit, I looked into the activities to find if they actually interest the students and they help the students make any progress. For kids age form 4-7,they cannot focus their attention like adults do, learning a language should be like playing for them. At this point, this program does well; it is totally a combination of art, songs, videos and music, but never lost its goal---study. When I was watching the demo, I find that native language support is used to scaffold English acquisition. And those activities are in an appropriate length for students to comprehend. Speech is also modified to fit learner. Except for all those above, this program also has a safe learning environment, which means students learn without fear, embarrassment or failure.Well,although the demo claims that it is adaptive to meets the needs of all students, I couldn’t tell only from the sample activities.

3. summary

This program is good; it doesn’t make any outstanding achievement on designing activities, but doesn’t make big mistakes either. If I will teach English to children at those ages, I will definitely teach in China. At that circumstance, I will not the program to teach grammar. However, the pronunciation and games of learning alphabets, or singing and graphics matching are still will be used. Generally speaking, this program is helpful for learning English. I will probably recommend this program to teachers who are working with a large number of beginning English learner age from 4-7. They can use this program to give their students better instructions which they cannot do for each student before. But the teachers need to bear in mind that even the program is good, they should use it wisely instead of lapping it up.

4. Producer Details

For more information, please visit www.imaginelearningenglish.com