The New Oxford Picture Dictionary (NOPD) CD-ROM

Available in monolingual English, English/Spanish, and English/Chinese editions.

NOPD CD-ROM has over 2,400 written and spoken vocabulary entries divided into 82 topics and grouped around 13 basic themes. Themes include topics such as community, food, plants, and animals. NOPD is interactive, encouraging students to match pictures with vocabulary words, play audio clips, and record their own pronunciation of vocabulary.

At the Menu Screen of NOPD one participant said, "Nice Graphics." Another said, "Graphics are good." They were immediately drawn into the program and each selected different vocabulary themes. In "Weather", a participant said "In rain it sounded like rain but I can't hear cloudy, snowy, or sunny ... ooh windy has sound." Another participant was impressed in the "Prepositions of Motion" section, "This is good because I can see the concept of each preposition. It's easy to understand what each preposition means." Likewise, in "Prepositions of Description" a participant said, "Cute cats! This is easy too."

Students quickly learned that not all the vocabulary themes were relevant for them. In "Construction" a participant said, "I'm not sure I need these words." In all vocabulary themes, participants could choose exercises for practice. They had to match a vocabulary word with a corresponding picture. The correct match would chime while an incorrect match earned a sad duck quack.

In the test section, once again they matched vocabulary words with corresponding pictures. One said, "Pretty good isn't it? I haven't seen a test this interactive. It's quick too." However, at the end of the test the results were provided as a raw score like 16/20 without telling the participant which answers he or she missed.

There were many activities like "Memory Game," "Crossword Puzzle," and "Read, Listen, & Speak." The "Memory Game" was like Concentration with several upside-down cards to match on the computer screen. In the "Crossword Puzzle" they typed in the answer after seeing a picture. Also, participants could get an additional hint by clicking on the pronunciation of the picture for an audio clip.

In the "Read, Listen, & Speak" there was a detailed text and dialogue, which could be read silently or by a native speaker after pressing the audio button.

Text and dialogues were followed by multiple choice questions and fill in the blank sentences to check comprehension. A participant said, "So many different exercises and each of them are interesting. This is fun. At first I thought it was just a dictionary but it's much more."