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EASE (Essential Academic Skills in English) Volume One - Listening to LecturesNB: This review first appeared in ReCALL Vol 13 No. 2, November 2001 Authors: Tim Kelly with Hilary Nesi and Rod Revell Distributors: ease, CELTE, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL UK. Tel: +44 (0) 24 7652 8440 E-mail: [email protected] (for general enquiries and for site licence and multi-user sales) System Requirements: a 486 PC or better, running Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT or 2000, a CD-ROM drive, 16 megabytes of memory, at least 8 megabytes of hard disk space, 16 bit colour or better, a sound card, a mouse Price: �30 (single user copy), �120 (5-user licence), �220 (6-20 use licence), �400 (full-site licence) Description The ease ("essential academic skills in english") listening to lectures CD-ROM is the first in a series of CD-ROMs planned by the ease team based at the University of Warwick. It is intended for students whose first language is not English and, as the title suggests, aims to help them overcome the difficulties they may encounter when listening to lectures in English. It can be used either as free-standing self-study material, or to complement an existing English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. The material is based on digital video recordings of lectures given in 25 different departments at the University of Warwick. This has been divided into six units focussing on different aspects of lectures such as Openings, Structure and Organisation, Language Functions, Attitude and Argumentation. Each of the units gives practice in a wide variety of tasks including listening for gist, listening for specific information, note-taking and vocabulary expansion. There is a mixture of short intensive listening (some of the clips last only a few seconds) and longer extended listening (although even the longest clips do not last more than a few minutes.) Technical performance The CD-ROM loads without problem, and I did not experience any technical difficulties while using it. The quality of the video clips is extremely high, and I was impressed with the consistently high standard of both sound and graphics. (The author gave a presentation on the problems of recording lectures at the British Association for Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP) conference in Leeds in 1999.) The ease website (http://www.ease.ac.uk) can be accessed at any time when using the CD-ROM and this provides technical assistance and further information. One of the innovative features of the CD-ROM is the cross-referencing dictionary, which in addition to providing a written definition also allows the user to watch a video clip in which the word is used. Pedagogical Content The listening to lectures CD-ROM has obviously been well thought out. It is easy to use, and the questions are clear and unambiguous. Students using it for self-study purposes should not have any problem following the instructions. There is a wide variety of tasks, enabling the student to practise the different skills involved in listening to lectures, and subskills such as vocabulary extension are not neglected. The authors' own publicity material states that it has been shortlisted for the European Academic Software Awards 2000. It may be, however, that some of the questions ("Does the lecturer give his name?") were too easy for some in-sessional students and the material is perhaps more suited to weaker students, particularly those on year-long pre-sessional courses. Strong and weak points Listening to lectures provides non-native students with the opportunity to analyse the language needed to understand lectures, and by giving the student the chance to listen to and watch this language in a variety of contexts, different learner needs are catered for. It will be an invaluable resource for students from a wide variety of language backgrounds and study specialisms, as lectures have been selected from across the spectrum of courses taught at the University of Warwick. When I was using it I occasionally found instances of overlapping questions and answers; in one case the user is told the structure of a lecture in feedback to one question, and then in the following question is asked to give the structure of the lecture! Moreover, cultural differences in lecturing styles are not fully exploited; despite some good examples in the video clips of self-deprecation by the lecturer, for example, the student's attention is not drawn specifically to it. Finally, I noted that the student is not given a chance to focus on a full-length lecture and put all the subskills learnt into practice. Although there are note-taking exercises in each unit, these never last more than a few minutes and in-sessional students in particular would perhaps benefit from the chance to listen to some complete lectures, with an accompanying transcript and sample notes as support. Conclusion Despite these points, listening to lectures in general is interesting, well thought-out and well presented and as such is a welcome addition to the current meagre battery of EAP listening materials. To sum up, I would say that the CD-ROM achieves what it sets out to do - "to prepare non-native speaker students for the realities of UK lecture theatres" and I would highly recommend it as an EAP self-study resource. I look forward to seeing the other CD-ROMS planned by the ease team in this series. SARAH NICHOLSON |
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