CALICO Software Review
CALICO Journal, Volume 21 Number 2, pp. 458-469
VTrain 4.0 (Vocabulary Trainer)
Olaf Böhlke - Creighton University
Product at a glance
Product type Multimedia Drill & Practice authoring tool; Multimedia Drill & Practice vocabulary training Language Authoring program Version 4 has English, German, and Spanish interface; Exercises/dictionaries can be created in almost any language. Free dictionaries can be downloaded from VTrain's website in more than 40 languages. Level Authoring level suitable for computer users at any level, contents can be created for any subject at any level; Training mode interface suitable for adolescents and adults at any level. Activities Drill & practice. Supports multimedia. Paired- associate items, multiple choice items, sentence- completion items, short-answer items. Media Format Web download of program and dictionaries Operating VTrain 4.0 for 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP (Service System: Pack required for Windows 98 First Edition) Windows only VTrain 1.6 in German for Windows 3.1 & 3.11 Hardware IBM-compatible 386+ requirements Faster processor recommended for 1000+ PC flashcard decks and multimedia. Optional printer to print cutout flashcards or vocabulary lists. RAM 4 MB RAM Hard Disk Space 8 MB for program, more for additional flashcard decks. Sound SoundBlaster compatible sound card, optional microphone Video SVGA video card, 24-bit recommended Supplementary Free WClip available soon: Software formerlyClip2VTrain (copy&paste program to clip vocabulary and export it into VTrainwhen authoring a flashcard deck) On-line Help File has User's Guide and step-by-step Documentation Getting Started Guide, Tip-of-the-day at startup, Context-sensitive help, and Clue Cards. Price: Single User Shareware, free for 30 hours. $15 US or 15 Euros for private use.
Multiple Copies Contact author for possible free site license for Site License schools, universities and other academic entities.
Distribution Commercial use only with prior written Rights permission. Exact copy of program can be distributed freely. VTrain flashcard decks can be downloaded and used for not-for-profit purposes.
General Description VTrain is an authoring program and vocabulary trainer for drill & practice exercises. Itincludes an impressive list of features and a generally user- friendly interface and context-sensitive help (F1). The ease of use and support for more than 40 languages has apparently attracted many users who in turn submit and share their VTrain-authored flashcard decks for free on the VTrain website. These flashcard decks include not only the more commonly taught world languages, but also languages like Cheyenne, Cherokee, Aymara, Swahili, Afrikaans, Esperanto, Latin, Basque, Maltese and many more. The website has abundant information on Windows language support issues like fonts and keyboard mapping. The drill & practice format in VTrain also supports flashcard decks for mathematics, psychology, law, geography etc.. The library of downloadable flashcard decks is growing. Learners for any subject or field of knowledge can implement exercises in formats like paired-associate items, multiple-choice items, sentence-completion items, and short-answer items (Blignaut & Knoetze, 1999).
The multimedia features available in VTrain enhance the common text-only drill & practice approach of other programs by supporting images, sounds, videos, diagrams, HTML, and text documents in Rich Text Format. The program supports OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) which allows the user to edit an object, e.g., a Microsoft Paint drawing (*.bmp) directly in VTrain, using the Microsoft Paint toolbar. Sound can either be recorded directly into VTrain, or it can be linked from external, pre-recorded sound files. Other powerful features include an automatic scheduling function for those learners who tend to procrastinate, several statistical graphs to track the learning process, a slideshow feature that presents items in a timed manner without user intervention (“flashing mode”), drag & drop during flashcard deck authoring across documents via MDI (multiple document interface), and a sorting feature. Users will appreciate the editable character map in a floating window and the fact that VTrain can automatically switch between fonts and keyboard layouts. Existing word lists can be imported from plain text files and vocabulary lists can be printed as a list or as cutout flashcards.
VTrain's concept of authoring and presenting exercises to the user is structured on two levels. The top level contains the master items list or flashcard decks (*.vok), the lower level consists of cardfile boxes (*.bsy) which can be filled with items from as many flashcard deck files as desired. The cardfile is the basis for a training session during which the flashcards are presented one by one. This structure allows the user to compile a selection of vocabulary items that are currently of interest without editing or compromising the source of the items, i.e., the flashcard decks. Authors and teachers who plan to use the software from a centralized LAN server can even update and correct any file on-the-fly with the "Smart File Update."
There is no printed manual available, but the on-line help menu offers many tips on features and theoretical background for this application, e.g., memory learning techniques like mnemonics and explorations into cognitive psychology (http://www.paul-raedle.de/vtrain/sci.htm). Some of the implemented features are based on such research and they will be discussed in detail below.
Evaluation Technological Features Installation of this program is straightforward. Visit the website, click on the ‘download’ page and download the 3.4 MB program. Then run the installer. VTrain also comes with an uninstaller. If you plan to use a convenient copy & paste program for collecting vocabulary from other sources for use with VTrain, then download the free utility “WClip (Word Clipper)", which is said to be "available soon" according to the VTrain website 1. A step-by-step tutorial is available and clue cards supplement the tutorial to help the first-time user understand the important differences between flashcard decks and cardfiles, and about the program itself.
After launching VTrain, a sample cardfile is loaded automatically. After clicking on the “filled” box with eleven flashcards, the training window appears, accompanied by a floating window character map with international letters for at least French, German, and Spanish. It is best to maximize the training window and resize the top frames to better see the text and image of a phone booth. The training window consists of three frames (two on top and one below). There are five navigation buttons below the bottom frame. As a convenient feature, the program offers keyboard shortcuts to all repetitive commands.
Figure 1 below, taken from VTrain 3 (June 2002), shows VTrain in training session mode with the default cardfile loaded. A question, or in this case an image with caption appeared at the top left frame (Question: telephone booth with image).
Figure 1
By clicking on the bottom frame, the user is able to type the answer and press
Testing the feedback capabilities, the reviewer typed various correct and incorrect answers. For example, “Una cabina telefonica” lacks the accent (telefónica) and uses the indefinite article, thus the feedback was “Well... 3 word(s) are missing or wrong.” Typing the accent correctly did not improve the feedback, but using “la” instead of “una” helped to reduce the feedback to “2 word(s) are missing or wrong.” Typing “la cabina de telefono” without an accent was evaluated as “still 1 word missing.” Apparently, the sample cardfile did not allow alternate correct responses. Furthermore, the user does not receive any help from the feedback, apart from being correct or incorrect. This may lead to initial frustration since “la cabina de telefono” is very close to the correct answer, yet the feedback does not differentiate between a missing accent and an incorrect lexical choice. The user does not even receive a pointer to figure out which of the four words is wrong. However, given the nature of this drill & practice program, the user will most likely see the same words and images over and over again and will eventually learn the exact wording of any particular flashcard as long as the “Show me the solution” button is used to adjust the learner’s expectation to the exact vocabulary in the cardfile. The VTrain author is working on better error correction for the next version.
Authoring Features Authoring flashcard decks in VTrain is easy and the program is very user-friendly. The help menu offers additional tips and information for the beginner as well as for the advanced user. While text- based VTrain exercises can be authored at the beginner level, adding sound files, video and other objects may require a few more computer skills. All objects are accessible via the menu (Edit => Insert Object) and the flashcard deck author doesn’t need to learn any scripting 2. Almost any world language can be input and used on either the front or the back of a flashcard. The text is then stored within the program in a flashcard deck file. The learning curve at the basic text-level is low and VTrain will allow most users to create their first flashcard deck in a very short time.
Accessibility for visually impaired users is made easier by giving the flashcard deck authors the option to increase the default size and change font and color of all flashcards, front and back. The default for the back (answer frame) is also the default font for the user input frame. The fonts and size of existing flashcard decks (*.vok files) can be modified to meet different visual needs. The font size increase feature is also useful for printing large print cutout flashcards.
Activities (Procedure) For flashcard deck authors, the VTrain website supplies a few textbook independent flashcard decks for downloading. Flashcard deck authors may opt to select some items of interest and drag and drop them into their own flashcard deck via the convenient MDI (multiple document interface), or create their own. As an additional convenience feature, existing word lists can be imported from a plain text document, preferably Windows ANSI, and even contain links to attached sound files. The free utility WClip (Word Clipper)facilitates the process of collecting vocabulary from any electronic document and the flashcard deck author can create flashcards 3 immediately . For students, VTrain can be a virtual trainer that clearly sets out to accompany them in their endeavor of acquiring knowledge and retain it as long as possible. For a successful training session, the learner should know the difference between a flashcard deck and a cardfile, and be able to accomplish basic navigation in the Windows environment. For adult users familiar with Windows this isn’t problematic, but since the program could just as well be useful for elementary school children, the absence of a customized graphical interface could prove to be an obstacle.
Once the program is set up on a PC, the student launches VTrain, opens an existing cardfile or creates a new cardfile and fills it with contents from any available flashcard decks. VTrainengages the student basically in a drill activity. The linguistic focus of such an activity can be designed to practice lexis, morphology, and spelling while at the same time enhancing the student’s reading and even listening skills, if sound files are used. Figure 2 below shows the design of a simple conjugation exercise with the verb “to have” in German.
Figure 2
Students can always see how well they know their subject matter. Firstly, the five boxes on the left indicate the current level of knowledge. For example, if a student has not learned 40 out of 100 new vocabulary words, the last box will contain those 40 words. The advantage of this sorting system will be discussed in the next section. Secondly, VTrain has four different statistical features that help track the student’s progress: Current session, knowledge level for the cardfile, and test frequency on current file and current flashcard.
Figure 3
Teacher Fit (Approach) It may be surprising to some readers that the CALICO Journal is reviewing a drill & practice program in this day and age, since this type of activity is often associated with the early days of the personal computer. But there are compelling reasons why VTrain can be an excellent study tool. The author himself has supplied ample information both on his website and in the help menu file about the underlying theory of VTrain, which is based on research from cognitive psychology.
For example, the author refers to the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus who proposed “a mathematical model for the phenomenon of forgetting” which “showed that … we forget about 75% of what we learn after 48 hours” (http://www.paul-raedle.de/vtrain/sci.htm#time). By staggering the learning process, learners would actually retain more knowledge for a longer time. The second German psychologist mentioned, Sebastian Leitner, created a learning cardfile system for selective learning (http://www.paul-raedle.de/vtrain/sci.htm#vtrain). One of the main advantages of selective learning is that each box or cardfile reflects the current level of knowledge on a given subject. Several boxes function like an indicator of a student’s mastery of a subject. Making efficient use of their time, students can focus on only those items that they don’t remember yet and skip the already acquired items. Contemporary research supports most features found in VTrain.
A recent study with young children by Jackson, Kutnick and Kington (2001) found that “young children performed better when working as individuals rather than in pairs on a drill & practice program” (130). Carrier and Sales (1987) state that “pairing students […] did not lead to higher scores on achievement tests than having them work alone” (15) and they discovered that paired students spent about one fourth of verbal interactions off-task (16). Jackson, Kutnick and Kington agree that “the advantage individuals have over groups in drill & practice tasks is due to differences in the amount of on-and off-task behaviour” (131). VTrain, like other drill & practice programs, should therefore be used by students studying individually.
VTrain's ability to program and combine verbal and visual information finds support, for example, in a study by Yoshii and Flaitz (2002) who discovered that the text-and-picture group had the highest level of vocabulary retention during the immediate post-test, although the two weeks delayed retention test showed no significant difference. VTrain's repetition and drill approach to vocabulary learning can be instrumental in achieving long-term vocabulary retention.
According to Vázquez-Abad and LaFleur (1990), a good drill program should inform the user of the available control over a program, group items by selection criteria, offer corrective feedback (VTrain Version 4 does lack sophistication with error correction), keep records of student performance, have random rearrangement of items, and separate working pools for each student (44-45). In support of random rearrangement of items, Nesbit (1992) adds that students learning from a randomized list achieved better performance on a post-test (119). VTrain supports most of these critical features and offers many more, thus becoming a powerful learning tool for various teaching approaches.
Flashcard decks in VTrain can be created to support, for example, the Lexical Approach (Lewis 1993). Flashcard decks would not only include single words (e.g., book, pen), but also lexical phrases with polywords (e.g., by the way), collocations (e.g., to conduct research, to be engaged in research) (Hill and Lewis 1997, 166), and institutionalized expressions (We’ll see; If I were you…) (Moudraia 2001). Furthermore, the WClip utility could be instrumental in exploiting and recording vocabulary in principled ways (Lewis 1993, 118). For example, learners could collect words, collocations, and institutionalized expressions to build their personalized vocabulary collection and export it to VTrain for later study and review.
The drill & practice design of VTrain is supported by other researchers like Salisbury (1990) who argues that the rationale for perfecting drill & practice exercises should be based on the notion of “automaticity of subskill” (23). “The need to automatize subskills is attributed to the limited capacity of working memory…. In order for learners to perform well on complex tasks which involve many subprocesses or operations, performance of these subprocesses must be automatic in order that attention can be devoted to the more intricate and complicated aspects of the total task” (23). He insists that “certain critical subskills must not only be well learned but overlearned, and through practice, be brought to a state of automaticity” (24). A teacher can create content in the VTrain learning environment that will help students to “overlearn” certain basic skills. Language students could drill the conjugation of high frequency verbs and learn the basic 500 words of a target language. Once students have achieved a “state of automaticity’ on certain subskills like verb conjugation, they will find it much easier to reach the next level of knowledge.
Salisbury identifies several issues that should play a role in the design of a good drill & practice program:
1. To reduce interference during the learning process, students should drill only on a small subset of items at a time. 2. Short, spaced periods of practice give better results and students should be able to stop and resume practice flashcard decks without having to go back to the beginning of a drill. 3. Spaced review enhances retention of learned material, and drills structured this way may be effective not only for initial learning, but also for skill maintenance. 4. Chunking may help the short-term memory and the sizes of each chunk of information can gradually be increased. The implication of this issue is identical to No.1 – students work on only a few items at a time. 5. People remember meaning rather than exact details (Wanner 1968, ref. by Salisbury 27), and a drill exercise should facilitate a meaningful mental representation of the material. This can be accomplished by using, for example, meaningful pictures. The objective should be to help the learner to convert a learning task which does not have much inherent meaning into something more meaningful by using, for example, mnemonic devices, keywords, and other memory techniques.
Exercises in VTrain can be created to support all of the above points. Cardfiles can consist of small sets of items (1) and the amount of information a student can work with can be increased slowly (4) by adding more items to an existing theme in a cardfile. VTrain lets students save their drill session (2) and even set up a schedule for spaced reviews before a major test, for example (3). The multimedia capability of VTrain gives flashcard deck authors the choice of including sound, images, or video to facilitate a meaningful mental representation for the student. In addition, VTrain's help file contains information on mnemonics (5).
The drill & practice format of VTrain allows any teacher to create well designed flashcards.VTrain gives the instructor the choice of walking the fine line between creating uncontextualized text-only vocabulary exercises and word drills that were so common in the audiolingual method, or developing curricula-based exercises with real-life high frequency vocabulary and words, polywords, collocations, institutionalized expressions based on speech acts, and even pragmatic contents.
Figure 4 Learner Fit (Design) Many features and possibilities of VTrain will benefit most students from middle school to university level and beyond who need to learn and retain knowledge that can be practiced in paired-associate formats. VTrain is for individual work and supports visual and auditory learning through the integration of multimedia. Its flashcard design can be used to create grammar and vocabulary cards at any linguistic level and the contents of these flashcard is only limited by the imagination of the flashcard deck author. When authoring flashcard decks, the process of collecting personal vocabulary is greatly facilitated by the free WCliputility. Students are always in control of their learning. Cardfile sessions can be interrupted and saved, vocabulary can be added or deleted and statistical information prevents any self-deception while learners study on their own. The scheduling feature and the cardfile boxes assure constant monitoring of the knowledge level and practice intervals can be staggered according to a user-defined schedule. This feature may be particularly useful for procrastinators who study only the night before the exam. On the other hand, the restricted response handling by the current version of VTrain is likely to prove frustrating to students, and would be greatly improved by the addition of a correction markup algorithm (i.e., indicating wrong/extra/missing letters, etc.).
Students are encouraged to explore the background information both in the help menu and on the VTrain website for tips on learning strategies like linguistic mnemonics (pegword method), visual mnemonics (pictures, graphs, diagrams, and videos), and mental mnemonics (loci). Serious students will most likely improve their learning techniques after exploring the wealth of information available in the help menu.
Summary VTrain is a powerful drill & practice authoring program that does very well in what it was designed to do. It is a generally stable multimedia-capable virtual trainer with a myriad of features to support and encourage the acquisition of knowledge by engaging students in their own learning and giving them control over how and when they study. Using VTraincan be a time saving and efficient choice to study and retain knowledge at any level.
Scaled rating (1 low-5 high) Implementation possibilities: 4.5 Pedagogical features: 4 Use of computer capabilities: 4 Ease of use (author + teacher / student): 4.5 / 4.5 Over-all evaluation: 4.5 Value for money: 5 Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my colleague Dr. David Vanderboegh for reading this document and offering helpful suggestions.
Notes 1. This reviewer used the earlier version Clip2VTrain since WClip is not available for download at the time of this writing: September 2002. For the sake of future references though, the new name WClip is used instead throughout this review. 2. Tags e.g., /* */ can be used to exclude words or hints during the "check answer" routine. 3. Unfortunately, the default separation tags or delimiters of VTrain [#124] are different than the ones used by WClip [#59]. However, the default separation tags or delimiters for Front/Back of each flashcard are identical, which makes the import procedure work smoothly.
Producer Details Developer/distributor Paul Rädle Am alten See 5, D-60489 Frankfurt, Germany
Email: [email protected] WWW: http://www.paul-raedle.de/vtrain/home.htm
Reviewer Information Olaf Böhlke is assistant professor of German and director of the Hitchcock Language Resource Center at Creighton University. His areas of interest include real-time text-based communication and computer-mediated communication (CMC), web-based language learning, student-learning assessment techniques, and German Studies.
Reviewer Contact HC-216 Modern Languages and Literatures Creighton University 2500 California Plaza Omaha, NE 68178
Phone: (402) 280-2505 Fax: (402) 280-3703 Email: [email protected] WWW: http://www.creighton.edu/langlab/
References Blignaut, S., & Knoetze, J. (1999). The use of computer-based instructional tools in teaching and learning. Retrieved June 1, 2002 fromhttp://hagar.up.ac.za/cie/med/modules/mio880_2000/resources/theory /drills.html
Carrier, C., & Sales, G. (1987). Pair vs. Individual Work on the Acquisition of Concepts in a Computer Based Instructional Lesson. Journal of Computer Based Instruction, 14 (1), 11-17.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Hill, J., & Lewis, M. (1997). The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations. Hove, UK: Language Teaching Publications.
Jackson, A., Kutnick, P., & Kington, A. (2001). Principles and practical grouping for the use of drill and practice programs. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 17 (2), 130-141.
Leitner, S. (1972, 2000). So lernt man Lernen. Freiburg, Wien, Basel: Herder.
Lewis, M. (1993). The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward. Hove, UK: Language Teaching Publications.
Moudraia, O. (2001). Lexical Approach to Second Language Teaching. ERIC. Retrieved May 20, 2002 from http://www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/0102lexical.html
Nemoianu, A. M. (1994). Review of The Lexical Approach, by M. Lewis. TESL-EJ 1 (2), R-3. Retrieved May 20, 2002 from http://www- writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej02/r.3.html
Nesbit, J. (1992). Motivation and item sequencing in paired-associate drill. Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, 19 (4), 119-124.
Salisbury, D. F. (1990). Cognitive psychology and its implications for designing drill and practice programs for computers. Journal of Computer- Based Instruction, 17 (1), 23-30.
Vázquez-Abad, J., & LaFleur, M. (1990). Design of a Performance- Responsive Drill and Practice Algorithm for Computer-Based Training. Computers & Education, 14 (1), 43-52. Yoshii, M., & Flaitz, J. (2002). Second language incidental vocabulary retention: The effect of picture and annotation types. CALICO Journal, 20 (1), 33�58.