Evaluation Of New Era Interactive English Learning System: From The Perspective Of User Satisfaction

With the introduction and application of the computer technology in the area of foreign language teaching and learning being enthusiastically endorsed by a lot of researchers and teachers, numerous software programs with multimedia technology for English teaching and learning have proliferated and emerged in large numbers. Researches on the area of human-computer interaction (HCI) have brought a great of fruitful results about the evaluation of an information system, with the evaluation approaches ranging from the approaches based on expert evaluation to the approaches involving the users themselves. User satisfaction has been considered as an important factor influencing the effectiveness of the system and as a feedback mechanism to uncover users' perception of the system's strengths and weakness. Although some previous studies have focused on users' performance after using particular software or a learning system designed and implemented in college to promote students' English learning, few studies have probed students' satisfaction with particular interactive software. The New Era Interactive English Learning System published by Tsinghua University Press is one of the software programs dedicated for training students' English and enhancing their learning skills, especially listening and speaking. This paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the system from the perspective of investigating students' attitudes towards the system and their satisfaction situation with it, trying to provide some suggestions for its improvement to bring the effectiveness and the advantages of the system into full play.Based on the literature review, the author has developed a questionnaire to reflect students' satisfaction. 143 freshmen with majors covering 4 different medical majors from Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology are chosen as the subjects. By distributing the questionnaires and having interviews with some of them, data are collected and analyzed by the SPSS13.0. It is found that students' satisfaction with the learning system is at a relatively high level with no significant difference between boys and girls, and among students with different English proficiency levels, there is also no significant difference in the satisfaction degree. Moreover, students have expressed their feelings about the learning system in a more detailed way during the interviews, providing some clues of reasons why they feel satisfied or dissatisfied.On the basis of the findings of the research, the paper has provided some implications and suggestions to the students, the teachers and the technical workers and the system designers respectively, aiming to improve the satisfaction degree of the students and to enhance the effectiveness of the system. It is expected that this paper can offer some insights to strengthen the awareness of implementing the system in a more effective way.