IT Course: Advantages and Disadvantages of Rosetta Stone

Potential Benefits:

Rosetta Stone has numerous methods and features to ensure the best possible learning experience.  For example, Dynamic Immersion is the core feature of learning of a new language; this software is designed to teach the language the same way first language is learned.  It uses a combination of images, texts, and sounds with difficulty levels that increase with the student’s progress.  This method provides the learner with an interactive virtual environment that will help teach vocabulary terms and grammatical rules in context without translation.  Dynamic immersion mimics introduces the new components of the language through recognition, correlation, and deduction, instead of just simple translation.  The Rosetta Stone system also has an Adaptive Recall feature that brings back review exercises to help the learner transfer this knowledge into long-term memory (Rockman 2009).  Contextual Formation uses life-like scenarios and patterns to provide the environment for the learner to reproduce the spoken or written language. Each new feature provides a unique way to learning the fundamental components of the language through technology.

Speech-Recognition technology uses state of the art signal processing and adaptive statistical methods to recognize spoken words and compare them against the voices of native speakers.  In Rosetta Stone, this software offers a wide range of tools to help teach pronunciation and speaking skills.  Learners build confidence and refine their pronunciation with dialogues and vocabulary building exercises.  For example, in the Native Socialization feature, they speak with native speakers in an online interactive session. These online environments are designed to facilitate language and social interactions. Online communities ensure that the learners generate language in conversional context through games, activities, and chatting rather than just hearing and repeating words or reading from a textbook.

Problems and Security Concerns:

In general, software is a program that enables a computer to perform specific tasks; Rosetta Stone is software with a very specific function to teach a foreign language.  With every software comes technical problems and security concerns, overall, Rosetta Stone is a very secure and efficient product with very little errors. One of the difficulties of learning a new language is the inability to evaluate one’s own pronunciation as beginners, something that cannot be adequately satisfied by simplistic systems that do not have practical interactions with the user (Tien-Lok, 2003).  One common complaint with Rosetta Stone is the vocabulary learning system is too slow; it does not teach enough words or grammatical structure in a clear manner to ensure fluency of the foreign language.  Also, another complaint is that Rosetta Stone does not teach common phrases that are useful in real life situations.  Rosetta Stone tries to fit every language into a cookie cutter formula (Kunz 2010); It does not address the special issues of that particular language like verb conjugations or noun and adjective cases.  Technologically, Rosetta Stone does not seem to have any major errors or concerns.