Software does some language things very well - think of your spell-checker - but it does other things terribly, your grammar-checker for example. It is a very new area so some things are experimental and new products arrive regularly; both facts that make it difficult to keep this section objective and up-to-date.

Collocation is an area of vocabulary study that is very useful to language learners. It is also an area linguists have given more attention to since computers made it easier to analyse.

Most of the software available for the study of collocation and related areas is written for experts or scholars and is typically difficult to use, but there are exceptions. Oxford publish the Oxford Phrasebuilder Genie CD-ROM as part of the Genie series. Mike Scott's Wordsmith Tools is a suite of programs for language analysis, which is designed for linguists and lexicographers but which is sufficiently well designed for a computer literate language learner to use. Collins Cobuild's Collocations on CD-ROM is an old product which has unfortunately been discontinued.

Complete courses on CD are not covered here. There are two reasons, the first is practical and the second a basic principle. There are many such courses and it would be impossible to give realistic information about them all. These courses frequently seem designed more to satisfy a market need than to teach English well. Anyway, I doubt whether even a very good software course could teach language effectively: we learn languages to communicate with other people so it is better to get our practice communicating with human beings not machines.

If there is a glut of these complete courses, there is also a dearth of software exercise books: electronic equivalents to the grammar and vocab exercises which are an essential part of any course. This is a pity for it is something software should be able to do rather well.

One notable exception is the newly published English Grammar in Use CD-ROM, usually sold with the grammar book of the same name. Watch this space for a review and expect other titles in the same series, as it seems CUP have resolved their piracy worries.

Other sections are:

Books: grammar reference; grammar exercise and more.
Dictionaries: monolingual; bilingual.
Electronic dictionaries: the best dictionaries for your computer.