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Lectra
Reviewed by Evelyn Battell, Instructor

It is hard to find good computer software to teach reading skills to our students. Much of the available software is not interesting to them because it is not written for adults, because it is not Canadian, or because it is written in the context of the white middle class. From France comes Lectra, a shareware reading program. It comes with no reading content; you provide the texts, so you can customize it to your students. It consists of a package of exercises that work with any text you enter. You can download a sample from the Internet, and by paying the very low fee, you get access to the instructor’s control package; this allows you to track individuals and groups of students.

The program allows beginning level students to read and reread text in many ways on the computer. One instructor noted that it is useful for students with extremely limited vocabulary. Some of the activities are:

• identifying a word from the text when it is flashed on the screen,
• putting words in alphabetical order,
• filling in cloze exercises,
• inserting punctuation or particular parts of speech,
• ordering the words in a sentence,
• completing sentences from a choice of words,
• inserting spaces between words,
• finding words in the text,
• matching words

As you can see, these are exercises designed to allow students to work with one text in many ways until they begin to be able to read it almost from memory.

The type size and layout of the exercises are good, and the actions with the mouse or space bar are satisfying. In exercises where you can choose the speed, the "fast" button is not so fast that nobody can use it. Students like most of the exercises and develop favourites. If you have set up a program for the student, when he signs in, the program suggests that he do certain exercises, but the student can follow the suggestions or not, as he chooses. We got permission from writers and publishers to type in many short texts, the kind of books our students like to read. Many students like to work with the program with the original book handy. They often work and rework the same material until they are getting it all right. There is enough “happening” to keep them engaged, but it is not childish or busy. It is a way to give some very beginning readers a bit of independence from the teacher. Of course, the more material you have typed in, the more choice the students will have and the easier it is to choose material suited to their interests or abilities. In our class, most students simply started at the first passage in the list. This is also an excellent program to use if you are doing language experience. Type the student’s story in as she talks, and there are exercises that let her take it apart and put it back together again many times.

There are some difficulties with the program. Entering text is a bit laborious; you have to make the text match the parameters of the program. You couldn’t let a student type in his own work without the program producing a number of errors in the use of the text. One short book, such as one of the Grass Roots Press Readers reviewed elsewhere in this bulletin, might all fit in one passage, but even a book with very few words may have to be broken into two passages when entering it.

The translation of the names of exercises is sometimes poor. For example, an exercise that people love, where the sentences come on screen with no spaces, and the student inserts the spaces, is called IFAN. That may stand for something in French, but it means nothing to me. Also the word "Fin" appears at the end of exercises; this could be seen as a chance for students to learn a word in French!

We have not been successful using it in a networked lab. Students' records do not save to their disks, but rather to the hard drive. If students do not sign in, they can use the program, but they do not get the suggested plan of attack, nor can they track their progress from one session to the next. The buttons across the bottom of the screen are tricky in that you often find you get the exercise next to the one you want. This seems to be a problem in the networked lab, not when the program is installed on one computer.

Nonetheless, in a world of few computer programs suited to adult beginning readers, Lectra provides a real opportunity. To view this program you simply go to the web address above and download. It comes with a short sample story as text so you can see how the exercises work. If you want to have tracking ability, you send the fee to the address above and the author e-mails you a code to enable the teacher's capabilities. Literacy BC does not have a copy of this program as it is available on the Internet.