Inquiry Group Essential Question #2 & 1 source

Charlotte Wesley-Musonda

April 4, 2011

Inquiry Group Essential Question #2 & 1 source

Qu.: How can educational technology enhance English as a Second Language student comprehension and interest?

This week I looked at instructional software packages for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). A popular and well-known brand is “Rosetta Stone”, which has products for many languages and audiences—adult, child, government, corporate, home school, and lastly, school classrooms.  I looked around the subsection for classrooms and ESL. The website does not give a detailed look at the actual software, one must contact the company directly for more information.  However, it offers “case studies” (a.k.a. testimonials) from a variety of school district users. 

An advantage of using an ESL software program is that students can work at their own pace. One of the school districts highlighted on the Rosetta Stone website is Centralia, California. This district is very heterogeneous, with pockets of wealth as well as areas of poverty and transience. Many children from the poorer areas speak limited English, and attend school only sporadically.  The Rosetta stone software package was implemented to help such students by assessing their English level and beginning immersion type instruction at that point.  Students can pick up where they left off, if they stop school and return later. In this way, student transience does not affect class progress, and each student can be engaged at his or her own level, regardless of native language. One area of difficulty I anticipate in adopting this type of software-based curriculum is that many students needing ESL instruction are illiterate in their native languages to varying degrees, so they need to learn to read and write in addition to learning English. My next step would be to research whether there is an ESL curriculum available that teaches literacy as well as language acquisition.

I think using a software package for ESL instruction is an excellent use of educational technology.  Programs such as Rosetta Stone are available via the internet or through individual licenses and CD-ROMs.  They incorporate not only a language lab-type listening component, but reading, writing and comprehension instruction as well. The instruction is built with appealing graphics and interactivity that frees the teacher from having to put together their own multimedia supplements and allows them to focus on student needs.

Bibliography:
Rosetta Stone Corporate website

http://www.rosettastone.com/schools
Retrieved April 4, 2011