Talk
to Me - Level 2 (Advanced)
Publisher:
Auralog S.A.
Age
group: 16-18 yrs
Year
published: 1999
Curriculum:
Spanish
Recommended
Price: £50 / €63.50
System:
PC
Min
spec to run:
· Pentium
· 16 Megabytes RAM
· Microsoft Windows 95
· 35 MB required on hard drive
· 16 bits Windows compatible sound card
· 2x Cd-Rom drive
· Microphone / Headphones and loudspeakers
· 640 x 768 graphics card with 256 colours
Summary
Talk to Me 2 covers most areas which are essential to learning a
foreign language:
· spoken and written language,
· comprehension,
· pronunciation,
· vocabulary and
· grammar (but there is no grammar book available for consultation).
Thanks to speech recognition, you can have the starring role in
a natural, interactive conversation with your computer, no matter
what your level is. The enhanced technology enables Talk to Me 2
to understand what you say, then guide the dialogue according to
your responses and correct your pronunciation mistakes.
The complete programme (1-beginner/intermediate and 2-advanced)
includes over 100 hours of lessons, over 40 hours of conversation
practise, over 700 sentences, 2,000 words covered by speech recognition,
and over 1,000 exercises access via internet.
Content
The contents of Talk to Me 2 have been carefully selected to suit
a communicative approach to learning. The type of language used
is suited for a good and committed advanced student. It is always
based on feedback from the learner: the programme is designed for
speech recognition. Therefore, the student has a starring role in
a natural, interactive conversation with the computer. Talk to Me
2 guides your dialogue according to your responses and corrects
you pronunciation mistakes.
Talk to Me 2 covers the following areas:
· hiring a house,
· the weather,
· on the phone,
· at the hotel,
· inviting friends,
· leisure activities,
· tourist visits and
· money.
The programme includes a free headset.
Teaching with this
Title
Talk to Me 2 works well in a classroom where the students are not
too near each other. The use of the microphone to provide feedback
had a twofold effect: initially, it put off people from speaking
into it for fear of being heard by the rest. Secondly, the students
thought they were disturbing the rest of the class. You need to
explain to your pupils clearly that it is supposed to be a 'noisy'
class.
The main problem that came up at the beginning was the sound quality
of the microphone / headphone when the students were recording themselves:
sometimes there was too much background noise. However, all this
can be fine-tuned by changing the settings for speech recognition
and audio.
Installation
The programme is loaded initially with the installation disk. Subsequent
times, put in the programme CD-ROM and just start it from the Windows
menu.
The programme loads quite fast. Once it has been installed and picked,
you do not have to choose the help language again (English, French,
German, etc.). You are then presented with the main menu screen.
From there you can access any of the Talk to Me 2 scenes (the dialogue,
pronunciation, exercises, internet, or choice of lesson).
The programme can be used on one computer at a time. These CD-ROMs
are licensed for use on a single system. Unfortunately, this means
that the school has to purchase multiple copies of the programme
to cover every computer.
Navigation
The interface for this programme is designed to resemble an airport,
where someone is about to check in and then take off. You become
a passenger and begin your interactive dialogue withTalk to Me 2.
The various icons in the main menu represent the skills you will
be working on: microphone (pronunciation), note-book (exercises),
people (dialogues) and the globe (internet connection to website
related to the programme). Other icons represent other functions:
information display board (lesson reports), plane (choice of lesson),
control tower (options), and fire engine (help), and stairs (exit).
This programme uses a sophisticated and colourful way to monitor
your progress: it records your percentage of hits and misses in
all exercises and displays them in the shape of elongated bubbles.
Documentation
The User's manual is very complete: it covers all the installation
procedures, guided tour, use of the toolbars, choice of lesson,
dialogue, pronunciation, exercises, resources via internet, lesson
reports, options, suggested learning paths, and recommendations
and solutions. It also includes a table of contents. The manual
comes in English only.
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