GMP BRIDGE TO ENGLISH ESL COURSE ( COBR-1390 )

Rating:
Summary: A mixed bag
Review: I bought this language course for a relative from Turkey who wanted to improve her English. The reason I bought this product was that Turkish was one of the instructional languages available. During installation the user selects one of five languages of instruction (others are French, Russian, Spanish, German). These are used for the button labels, instructions, as well as grammar notes and an online dictionary.

The course appears to be designed to teach basic (British) English to students of high-school level and up. I must say the course is pretty thorough, as it covers many grammar constructs and a good number of words. However, I found the design of the program and the pedagogical techniques used to be not so well thought out.

What I disliked the most about the course was the design of the exercises. For example one exercise requires you to assemble the pieces of a puzzle made up of tiles with words. You need to put together six sentences of five words each. Each piece of the puzzle has a word printed on it, as well as part of a larger picture. When the pieces come together, you get to see what the whole picture is, along with the sentences printed on the picture. The strange thing is that more than one of the pieces can have the same word on them, like "is", so you need to figure out which duplicated word goes into which sentence according to the location of its puzzle piece within the big picture. So the exercise degenerates into assembling pieces of an image, rather than words of sentences.

Other exercises are better thought out. One example is the one where the students acts as the receptionist at a hotel and must ask a series of questions (by typing) to a group of new customers about their nationality, where they come from, etc. The program has been programmed with a large number of possible sentences that the receptionist can ask that are all equally valid. Thus, in this case the student is not constrained into any pre-set sentence and can even experiment with alternative constructs.

Another feature that may be quite useful is a visual sound wave form comparison tool to improve one's pronunciation against a native speaker's.

Some of the exercises do require some studying without the computer. Of course, this would be unavoidable with any decent language instruction course. For example, after learning words for nationalities by looking at cartoons of some national stereotypes ("American" is a man with cowboy hat and boots, carrying a brief case), the exercise that immediately follows the lesson makes you answer questions by typing the words correctly, within a time limit of fifteen seconds.

(Speaking of learning about concepts by looking at cartoons, I found it odd that the adjective "stupid" was used to describe a man without any facial expression.)

I found this instructional program to be a mixed bag. Mine is not the perspective of a non-English speaker, but I can easily imagine a student using this program generally benefiting from it while struggling with certain parts of it.

I guess the decision to buy this product depends on whether better alternatives exist. I recently got to play with another similarly-priced program, "Rosetta Stone English Explorer" which was better designed as an instructional medium but seemed to have much more limited content than this one.

In my case, I was rather unimpressed by the overall quality of "Bridge to English Course" and returned it to Amazon for a refund. I wish a review of this product were available before my purchase so that I could make a more informed decision. Amazon deducts a restocking fee if an item's reason for returning is "Product quality is not up to my expectations"