Second, it should provide immediate feedback to the student in the form of correction and scoring. Furthermore, the scoring data should be available to the instructor in organized and reasonably detailed form. The content of the exercises should not be obscured by the necessity of wrestling with a complex or counter-intuitive interface. It should be accessible to students, which means, from a technological standpoint, that it should be networkable. And not only should it run on the network, but it should run reliably.
Most software distributed with college language textbooks meets very few of the above criteria.
Either the exercises are the same as in the book, or if there are different exercises, there is no means of recording student scores. Or if there is a way to record student scores, there is no good way to organize and distribute the data to instructors. Or even if the content is excellent, the interface acceptable, the scoring and data distribution straightforward, it is non-networkable, and therefore of limited accessibility to students. The student gets to concentrate on her French grammar, rather than how to run the program. ELFE prompts meaningfully for errors, and gives instant feedback to the student.