INFORMATION ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

SUITE OF COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING PROGRAMS

by Gary R. Jahn, Developer, University of Minnesota

Note: The several items listed below were all developed in connection with two major grant projects, supported by funding from university, industrial, and government agencies, which I directed between 1986 and 1989. The programs were developed to run under DOS (version 3.3 or higher) and MS Windows (version 3.0 or higher).

The general product of the first project was a computer instructional program called "Russian Conjugation and Declension"(RCD). The purpose of this program is to assist students of Russian in learning and mastering required vocabulary and the various patterns of inflection which characterize nouns, verbs, and adjectives in Russian. Like many such programs, RCD is actually a whole group of programs. This group includes: student-delivery programs for each of the four main instructional modules (Vocabulary, Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives); data-base editors for each module (required for the production of the drill sets which form the heart of each of the modules); configuration utilities for each module (required to permit the user or the instructor to specify the manner in which the drill material will be presented to the student in each module [e.g., with/without helps, with/without second chances on particular items, with/without a choice of keyboard mappings, with/without possibility of repeating tests/drills]); a comptroller program which permits and simplifies the creation of individually designed student disks from which records of student performance may be extracted; and a data-extractor program which can read and analyze data pertaining to student performance which has been collected on properly created student disks.

The general product of the second project was a computer instructional program called "Sentences." The purpose of this program was to devise an MSWindows-conformant shell program for the delivery of instructional material pertaining to the construction of grammatically correct sentences in any alphabetic language. "Sentences" consists of a keyboard editor/mapper program, a combined drill editor/comptroller/data extractor program, and a student delivery program. These programs permit the incorporation of drill and instructional material in any alphabetic target language (whether written right to left (as Hebrew) or left to right (as Russian). Upon successful completion of the shell program I implemented a complete set of lessons for use with two textbooks of Russian language, Robert Baker et al., "Russian for Everybody" and Patricia Davis and Donald Oprendek, "Making Progress in Russian." Like the RCD program, "Sentences" may be configured for delivery under a variety of instructional parameters and data pertaining to student performance may be extracted from properly created student disks.

The programs involved in the development of these two projects are listed separately below. RCD and the Sentences shell program were commercially available from Exceller Software in Ithaca NY until 1993, when the steady advance of hardware capability and variety rendered continued support of the programs no longer viable financially. A selection of the student delivery programs from both "Russian Conjugation and Declension" and "Sentences" are available electronically from http://jahn.cla.umn.edu/gary.html.

"Sentences" [Assists students in the assimilation of basic grammatical structures by providing facilities for tutorial, reference, and several varieties of question, including multiple choice, question-answer, cue-response, fill-in, and cloze. The program as a whole consists of a drill-editor and lesson maker, a student delivery module, and a keyboard editor.]

"Sentences" for beginning Russian language learners; instruction and drill to supplement the study of beginning Russian using the textbook by R. Baker et al., "Russian for Everybody."

"Sentences" for intermediate Russian language learners [co-authored with James E. Brown]; instruction and drill to supplement the study of intermediate Russian using the textbook by P. Davis and D. Oprendek, "Making Progress in Russian."

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Vocabulary" [Assists students in the memorization of base forms of vocabulary.]

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Nouns" [Teaches students the processes involved in declining nouns.]

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Adjectives" [Teaches students the processes involved in declining adjectives.]

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Vocabulary in Context" [presentation and drill of active vocabulary from one chapter of a textbook as used in the grammatical environments presented in that chapter.]

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Verbs" [Teaches students the processes involved in conjugating verbs.]

"Russian Tutorial Series: Nouns" [Teaches students the processes involved in declining nouns in Russian (an implementation of Russian Conjugation and Declension: Nouns for Macintosh platform)].

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Data-Base Editors" [A set of four programs which allow the teacher or user of Russian Conjugation and Declension to modify or add to the lexical data used by the programs for example and drill].

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Configuration File Utilities" [A set of four programs which allow the teacher or user of Russian Conjugation and Declension to modify the operating parameters of the various programs].

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Comptroller" [A program which allows the teacher to prepare individualized student instructional disks from which data pertaining to student performance of program material can later be extracted.]

"Russian Conjugation and Declension: Lesson Reader" [A program which allows the teacher to extract and analyze data pertaining to the performance of individual students or specified groups of students from properly created student instructional disks.]