This survey gathered student opinions of Auralog's "Tell Me More Pro" CD-ROM, for $199 individual use and $499.95 for a network of five. It also comes in the standard version for $79.99 retail. Participants consisted of ESOL students at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Participants were of advanced English proficiency and used the "advanced" CD-ROM portion of "Tell Me More Pro." All five had more than 20 hours of experience using computer assisted language learning (CALL) programs prior to this survey.

A team of language teaching specialists created "Tell Me More Pro." It has more than 200 hours of learning, more than 2,000 exercises and educational games, 35 hours of conversation practice, and more than 500 sentences and 2,000 words with speech recognition. The investigator had never previously seen a more comprehensive and quality ESL program.

From the beginning "Tell Me More Pro" was of high production quality. Watching a video clip for the second time, a participant easily scanned forward and backward to search for specific information she had missed. After the video clip, she laughed at some of the multiple-choice comprehension check questions. For example, after the question "What does the architect have left to do now," a multiple-choice option was, "hit his head against the wall." Despite the humor, however, the questions were challenging and participants were hard pressed to miss fewer than 30%. A powerful tool for some participants was the pronunciation portion with the "voice graph" feature. A participant said, "That's cute. This is pretty sophisticated. How this program is using graphics is very stylish." After several repeated attempts at recording her voice and imitating the native speaker's voice example, the participant got her "voice graph" to match the example. After this success she said, "I think I'm doing really great!"

The dialogue section effectively used speech recognition. One participant repeated four times, "Gosh, it understands me!" The investigator thought this was the best speech recognition ESL program he had yet seen. The program would not understand participants if their intonation was off, but participants usually could hear their intonation problems and eventually adjust accordingly.

In the exercise, "word association," participants clicked and dragged words from a left column to words in a right column. The connection resulted in colored lines between the corresponding words and each line was a different color. Correct matches were rewarded with a drum role, applause, or both. After getting all correct matches and hearing the "applause" a participant said, "cute!" Participants appeared motivated by the multi-sensory feedback. Another exercise was "word order," which used speech recognition to verbally put words into correct sentence order. This section was difficult for several participants but eventually the computer recognized proper intonation or stress and acknowledged the correct response. "This is too frustrating," said one participant and then later admitted she needed the practice. In contrast, the "fill in the blanks" section more easily recognized participant speech. "This is much easier," she said.

"Dictation" exercises challenged listening comprehension. ("What system did it say?") Participants could repeat the dictation and adjust their final sentences. After dictating, a red circle showed where mistakes were made so participants could self-correct. (Oh boy, it's so hard.") The investigator felt participants' listening skills really needed this practice. In "picture/word association," participants spoke to the program to match words to a corresponding picture. Participants were excited when their intonation was correct and the program understood them, but they were often not understood. The investigator felt this section could benefit from a voice graph so participants could see their intonation errors. In "the right word" exercise, participants spoke to the program to place a correct word into a sentence. In "crossword puzzle" participants clicked on letters to spell words after the program spoke to them. It challenged their listening comprehension and spelling abilities.

The final section was "grammar & glossary." The investigator felt this was a comprehensive tool for both reference and grammar lessons. The glossary had a list of words that participants could click to hear native pronunciation.

There were extensive grammar rules and examples of proper grammar use. It also maintained a sense of humor whenever possible with, for example, a fountain graphic showing the difference between "little" and "much" water. "Pretty cute. This is funny software." After using such a quality program it was disappointing that the "exit" option was difficult to find. It turned out to be a graphic of a door on the main menu.

The investigator and all the participants, however, were impressed with the program overall and were anxious to use it more in the future.