Start Smart with 'Smart Start'

Smart Start English, formerly known as "Triple Play Plus," ($49.95 Syracuse) is aimed at beginning and intermediate students. It provides hundreds of words, phrases, conversations, and dozens of fun activities and games featuring speech recognition and record/playback. Participants in our survey practiced pronunciation of key words with an interactive trainer and seemed to enjoy a variety of game-style formats. Speech recognition provided feedback to reward correct answers and pronunciation, while Record/playback compared participants to an American English speaker.

Students gravitated toward the games. One Korean participant began playing "Concen-tration" and remarked, "Lots of pictures is nice. Pictures are kinda old but it's colorful and enjoyable." Students agreed that there was plenty of vocabulary and that games were fun. After playing Concentration for about 10 minutes, a Japanese participant moved on to "Level 3 Conversations" and chose "shopping." After trying it she said, "Slowing down the speed of recorded sentences is nice. And the short sentences allows me to understand better. It makes it more involved."

Most activities were sound intensive and incorporated sound into each exercise. Even though these participants were at a higher level than some of the English vocabulary, they appreciated the sounds and graphics when they found basic vocabulary. "Clicking the eye mark and you can see what the word means with a picture. Visual is really good," said one student. The audio and graphics were highly motivational but the favorite "Smart Start" feature was the variety of games. "This program is fun!" enthused our survey participants.