Saturday, October 11, 2008

Experiencing Rosetta Stone Program

Recently I happened to see the commercial for Rosetta stone। The famous Olympics gold medalist, Michael Phelps was advertizing Chinese language learning program। He said that Rosetta stone was the fastest language learning program। After I had access the website, the narrator in the demo program explained the concept of the program। He said that in order to accelerate the language learning, the program combined five different skills; images, intuition, interactivity, instruction, and immersion. This program seems to fulfill the needs of beginning learner of the target language. Throughout the pattern drills, learners will quickly catch the basic vocabulary and simple sentences.
In the program, I could practice simple Turkish words and sentences such as a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, and read. It did not begin with Turkish Alphabet. They taught the words right from the beginning. I could see the pictures that introduced the words. This program was not kind because there was no translation, which was described as immersion. Although they did not explicitly explain the meaning of the words or sentences, I could understand the meaning of written and spoken Turkish. The pictures were associated with the words. These small language fragments were soon extended to sentences after a few repetitive drills. If the learners have certain level of intelligence, they could easily follow the procedure without losing the right track.
The program strictly follows the Natural Language Approach. Babies start to learn from listening at first. They keep listening repetitively until they can associate the words and the visual images they see around them. More than a year later, they finally begin to produce the words. The Rosetta stone follow the same path. From simple words that are connected to pictures soon develop to complex sentences by spiral learning approach. Learners can build linguistic features of target language by connecting to the familiar images that surround them.
In the demo program, I could not find the further detail because they did not show the advanced version. However, learners seem to record or listen to their own voices according to the advertisement. I had participated in designing an online English learning program before I came to the U.S. We tried to develop the interactive program that users can actively engage in the learning process. For instance, learners can create dialogues with computer voices, recording their own voices in the computer, listening to them, and typing in the blanks, etc. Even if it is a virtual reality, interactive environment is crucial in technology based learning situation. I wish I would get a chance to see main part of Rosetta stone.

No comments: