Unit 1
WHAT IS CALL?
Call is the acronym for computer-assisted language learning. Although, as we will see below, the field or significant parts of it sometimes go by other names, CALL seems to be the most widely accepted generic term. In this foundation course, CALL will be used in a broad sense to refer to any endeavor involving the computer in some significant way iin language teaching and learning.
ACRONYMS AND ATTITUDES
This field has gone by a number of different names as groups of practitioners have attemted to promote their own views and philosophies, in some cases in an attemt to distance the field from tutorial CALL, which is sometiimes regarded as incompatible with interactionist and social constructivist approaches to language teaching.
A THUMBNAIL SKETCH OF CALL HISTORY
CALL began in the 1960s with mainframe-based drill and practice materials, specially those based on the University of Illinois’ PLATO system. It remained an insignificant alternative for language learning outside of a few universities until the spread of the microcomputer into educational settings in the early 1980s.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, the Apple Macintosh replaced the Apple II in many educational settings in the US and became and immediate favorite among teacher-developers because of the support of HyperCard, a powerful but easy-to-use authoring program. The PC market was also dominant in mostt countries outside the US because the machines could be obtained much more cheaply than Macs. Reasonaly-priced authoring programs became available for PCs, and with the development of the Windows operating system for PCs and standardization of sound formats, the distinction between PC and Mac became less critical.
During this period, the use of the computer as a tool increased, especially as teachers developed innovative techinques for using email and word processors became integrated into writiing classes. Some teachers helped students develop their own hyperCard projeects or ones in similar applications developed for the PC, such as ToolBook.
Two major changes came starting in the mid-1990s. one was the dramatic increase in commercial multiimedia for language learning as CD-ROOMs became standard in home computers. The other was the development of the world wide web. Because of the web and increased access to the Internet in general, the past has seen a major shift toward tool uses, and many newcomers to CALL define the field almost entirely in those terms.
THE SCOPE OF CALL
In previous versions of this course. I noted that teachers interested in CALL can get involved iin a number of different ways, which I referred to as teacher roles.
· As researchers: into second language acquisition, human-computer interaction, what works for CALL.
· As consumers of CALL software for class use or building web activities into course work
· As directors, helping students find and use supplementary CALL materials or web resources.
· As managers of computer-mediated communication among learners in and out of class
· As software or web developerrs, either “from scratch” or adding new materials to existiing templates
· As coaches to help students develop software, websites, and general computer literacy
· As CALL experts for your program, helping other teachers and administrators with CALL implementations
· As CALL professionals, consulting on external projects, doing software reviews for journals, making conference presentations, writing papers, interpreting and applying CALL research, and/or providing input to the field at large.
Mike Levy and I (Hubbard & levy,2006) have taken this idea of role and develop it further it to try to delineate the field for the purposes of CALL teacher eduucation. Specifically, we distinguish two types of roles for individuals engaged in CALL.
The focus of the preesent teacher-oriented course is illustrateed in Figure I below, where these institutional and functional rolees cann be seen as two dimeensions in a matrix. As the shading suggests, the focus is primarily on teachers as practitioners, making effective use of what others have produced in the way of materials and lessons. The secondary focus is on teachers as deevelopers, not just of CALL software but of language learning activities and tasks that involve the computer.
Unit 2: Courseware Evaluation, Development, and Implementation.
This unit looks at the sub-field of tutorial CALL from the perspectives of both the end users (teachers and students) and developers. It introduces the term courseware, which refers to software that is used to support formal language learning. In practice, courseware has been used to refer to everything from complete software packages that can be used without a teacher to software that is just a part of language learning course, sometimes a minor or optional supplementary part.
As a backdrop too this, in a series of papers from 1987 to 1996, I attempted to develop a comprehensive methodological framework for CALL that integrated development, evaluation and implementation. The framework expanded on an earlier one by martin Philips (1985) and used the Richards and Rodgers (1982) framework (Method: approach, design, and procedure) as an organizing scheme to characterize the apparent relationships between elements of language teaching and learning and computer. The driving force behind it was the observation that eexisting approaches to instructional design and in particular evaluation did not pay sufficient attention too language learning or else limited themselves to specific teaching approaches. I will be introducing a simplified version of the framework here.
ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES
Development, evaluation, and implementation are part of a logical progression in any situation that has an end product. If a company produces a computer program for balancing your checkbook, for instance, theyy need to 1) design it with the needs of the end users in mind, 2) evaluate it in house and encourage outsiders to review it, and 3) have a mechanism to implement it, including figuring out how to make it available and training end users in its effective operation. Of course this can be and often is cyclic rather than linear, with the feedback from evaluation and implementation providing data for subsequent development.
CALL software is a bit different from a checkbook balancing program in that it involves a more complex view of who the evaluators and end users are. Evaluation, for instance, may be connected to the developer and be used for improving the courseware prior to release, or it may be done by an outside reviewer for a professional journal.
Development, evaluation, and implementation are thus simultaneously part of a logical progression of a courseware project and interacting manifestations of its reality. This is true whether the project is for CALL or for some other educational purpose. However, the specific domain of language teaching and learning imposes on these three a set of considerations that are not exactly the same as we would find in courseware for, say, history or chemistry or math.
Second, like Richards and Rodgers’ framework, but unlike most for CALL, there is an attempt to be agnostic here with respect to what actually constitutes good language teaching through computers. For the field as a whole, we need a framework which can be used equally by those whose language teaching approaches might be as diverse as those of grammar-translation, lexical, communicative, sociocultural, or interactionist proponents. Thus the framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
FRAMEWORK FUNDAMENTALS
The development and evaluation modules are most closely related in terms of the elements considered. Implementation feeds on the output of evaluation. However, each module can impact the others overtime, as when information from evaluation and implementation is returned to developers for updates, patches, or considerations in later versions of the product.
EVALUATION MODULE
Evaluation involves three kinds of considerations. A crucial aspect is to understand what the courseware does first before attempting to judge it: this is, not surprisingly, difficult to do because as soon as we start interacting with a program we want to judge it. If an evaluator wants to approach the problem a little more objectively, the first consideration then is the operational description of the software, which essentially focuses on the procedure level elements. The design elements essentially can be subsumed under the label “learner fit.”
ALTERNATIVES
The methodological approach I present here has proved useful over the years but there are at least two others that desrve mention, espeecially once we begin to look beyond tutorial CALL.
DEVELOPMENT MODULE
Courseware development refers to the process of going from the idea of creating a piece of tutorial software through the final product. It should be informed by general principles of instructional design. However, I believe it is also critically important to recognize the pedagogical aspects specific to language learning that traditional instructional design approaches may overlook.
Like the development module, both the evaluation and implementation modules rely on versions of Richards and Rodgers’ categories of approach, design, and procedure. However, the framework diverges from Richard and Rodgerrs in attempting to account for individual language programs rather than whole methods.
Approach. A language teaching approach is taken to include assumptions about what language is and how languages are learned. These are manifested in software by considering them in light of the realities of the computer delivery system. The result is a set approach-based software design criteria.
Design. The design portion of the development framework draws heavily from Philips (1985) and includes elements such as the following: language difficulty, program difficulty, program content, language focus (also called program focus), skill focus (also called learner focus), and learner styles supported.
Procedure. The procedure considerations are much more specific to the computing environment. They begin with concept of “activity type”, which is the general form of the exercise, e.g. text plus comprenhension questions, picture identification, text reconstruction.
IMPLEMENTATION MODULE
Implementation considerations are relevant during the evaluation process, but they become crucial when deciding how best to use software that is available. Some of the key questions to address in implementation are the following.
RESOURCES FOR EVALUATION
Besides the evaluation framework presented here, it is common to see evaluation check lists or other procedures. Here is the example.
