1. All language concepts are sequenced according to conceptual difficulty. After a concept has been introduced, it appears frequently in subsequent units.

2. After the initial beginner’s program, all lesson contain input of the three important senses essential for learning a second language: audio input, pictorial input, and text input.

3. An auditory presentation accompanies every verbal unit spoken clearly and at a moderate rate by professional speakers. Students listen to thousands of sentences in each unit. Initially students hear short sentences. Gradually, the sentences increase in length, enabling the student to process audio input without difficulty.

4. The meaning of all words, phrases, and sentences is presented through the use of clearly illustrated pictures that convey the meaning of the grammar and vocabulary contained in the respective sentence. Each disc contains from 1,000 to more than 4,000 pictures. The first four discs contain over 14,000 images, each designed to enable the language learner to grasp the meaning of each utterance.

5. Written texts appear below the pictures, enabling the student simultaneously to see the illustration, hear the language unit spoken, and see the written text. The simultaneous presentation of text, audio input, and picture enables the student to grasp quickly the meaning of each sentence.

6. The Learnables® language computer course is a specially designed sequence of grammatical and topical subjects that promote effective and rapid language learning. The course begins with relatively simple concepts and gradually introduces more complex grammar and subject matter. Early concepts include aspects of eating, shopping, house routines, and family considerations, whereas later concepts include past tense, present perfect, future tense, modals, geometric shapes, time, explanations and conditionals.

7. The vocabulary and grammar are presented in contextual format, using sequential scripts. For example, to teach the verb “pick up” an item falls to the floor and then a person picks it up. As another example, to teach “take off” and “land” of an airplane, the following sequence is presented: an airplane takes off, passengers eat on the airplane, and then the airplane lands. The Learnables® approach is to use sequences, not isolated sentences, as is common in other language courses.

8. Acquiring conversational competence requires hearing thousands of conversations in which a large number of vocabulary units appear. Additionally the vocabulary items appear with words with which they are commonly associated, called collocations. For example, large goes with eggs in the supermarket. We buy large eggs, not big eggs. The number of collocations in a language is very large, but they can be learned when the student has an opportunity to hear many conversations on a regular basis. Some examples of common collocations are for bread: dark toast, for meat: well done; for hotel: chamber maid, but room service; for television: watch television, but see a movie; for mowing: mow the grass and cut the grass, mow the lawn, but not cut the lawn; for school paper: term paper, but not semester paper; for ovation: standing ovation, but not sitting ovation; for a movie: rerelease, but for a play: revival. The collocations of a language can only be learned in context, by hearing or reading how they are used. The Learnables® English language course immerses the learner in a great many conversations across a wide spectrum of topics that include a large number of collocations.

9. The Learnables® language computer course is appropriately used with all ongoing instructional programs. Each unit of The Learnables® is clearly identified as to content, providing hundreds of examples of a particular topic. No special effort or planning on the part of the instructor is required to use The Learnables® CD-ROMs.

10. Instructors can use the computer course to identify the individual language needs of the student. Each unit has a multiple choice pretest exercise that is administered and scored automatically by the computer to indicate whether the student should be assigned to take a particular unit. These same exercises are used also to evaluate the student’s understanding of each unit.

Includes the following:

Beginning Level: The Beginning Level disc is designed for students with little or no understanding of English. Each lesson contains 100 items, exercises, games, movies, and slide shows. It emphasizes basic nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, and singular and plural forms.

Intermediate Level—Disc 1: Emphasized in disc 1 are basic prepositions (in, on, under, over, next to, of, and to), colors, plurals and plural concepts (few, many, most, several, lots etc.), all pronouns, verbs (simple present, present progressive, simple past), and verb forms of is/are, was/were etc.

Intermediate Level—Disc 2: This disc is a comprehensive disc of grammatical and content units. A major component of this disc is the advanced preposition unit which covers all major English prepositions, such as across, except, beside, between, among, against, through etc. Content areas include Family, Animals, Human Body, Food, Clothing, and Grooming. Grammatical units include Still and Again, Numbers, Present Perfect, Relative Clause, Reflexives, Basic Negatives and Future.

Advanced Level—Disc 1: Stories in Present Tense retold in Past Tense, Stories using modal verbs, Concepts of Big and Small, Walking, Placement, and Eating in considerable detail. (Disc is in preparation.)