--- Forwarded Message from Joel Goldfield <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 11:18:27 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Joel Goldfield <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Cc: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: #5657.3 To drill or not to drill

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This is an interesting thread.  We're putting in the Teleste digital materials
along with a new data management server and audio/video streamserver
as part of a FLAC initiative around campus to help not only language students, but also faculty
in other disciplines who want to boost their foreign language abilities.  Many
of them are mainly concerned with attending conferences where French, German and
Spanish are spoken and in using GIS (Geographical Information Systems) databases
in these languages.

Only 2 of the 50 or so installations in this phase will have the student-record-over-master-track
feature as our queries of language faculty and our anecdotal observations of students over
the past 5 years indicate that
there has been no apparent pedagogical or curricular impetus for most of them to 
use such a feature, let alone use the typical lab record-and-compare function for reasons
which some of the previous writers to this thread have already stated, most
notably, the one about recording several wrong answers in a row without a
clue that they were incorrect.  Dropping the simultaneous master-track/student-track
option saves a great deal of money in hardware and software version choices in
our case, yet can always be added back if there's ever proof with our few full
versions or eventual faculty comments that such features may be warranted.

Since some of the newer CD-ROM packages have developed relatively sophisticated and
potentially useful audio-comparison and speech recognition, we're content for now to use
these specific products to test the effects of these features.

Regards,
Joel Goldfield
Fairfield University