COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING
Unit 1: Introduction to Computer-Assisted Language Learning.
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 in language teaching and learning.
Ø The history of CALL
CALL began in the 1960s with mainframe-based drill and practice materials, especially 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. Early programs were written by teacher-developers on Apple II, IBM PC, and BBC computers, and were often distributed for free. Commercial programs, when available, were usually quite expensive but were generally more stable and technically sophisticated (though not as innovative). There was some work done with interactive laser disks during this time which provided the foundations for multimedia. The traditional language labs began to be replaced with dedicated computer labs for language learning, a trend that continues today.
v THE SCOPE OF CALL
In previous versions of this course, I noted that teachers interested in CALL can get involved in 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 developers, either "from scratch" or adding new materials to existing 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.
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.
v 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, they 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.
v FRAMEWORK FUNDAMENTALS
The three modules (development, evaluation, implementation) share core components inspired by Richards & Rodgers (1982). In each case their original components are adapted, interpreted, and supplemented to include the reality of the computer as the interface between the teacher/developer and materials and the learner. (Realistically, in any tutorial program there IS a teacher (or at least a teaching presence) in addition to the materials themselves.) The development and evaluation modules are most closely related in terms of the elements considered. Implementation feeds on the output of evaluation.
v 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.
v 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.
· Approach. A language teaching approach is taken to include assumptions about what language is and how languages are learned.
· Design. The design portion of the development framework draws heavily from Phillips (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 the concept of "activity type", which is the general form of the exercise, e.g. text plus comprehension questions, picture identification, text reconstruction.
v RESOURCES FOR EVALUATION
Besides the evaluation framework presented here, it is common to see evaluation checklists or other procedures. Here are a few examples.
v RESOURCES FOR DEVELOPMENT
Additional instructional design issues. As noted, there is a need to consider CALL software development, as well as evaluation, and implementation, as it relates to the general field of instructional design. In making that consideration, however, it is important to be aware that instructional design often takes a "training for mastery" approach that is not appropriate for many aspects of language learning. A recommended text for developers is Clark & Mayer (2003).
Advice for courseware design along with examples of CALL activity types for courseware can be found on the ICT4LT site site mentioned in Unit 1: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-2
Unit 3: Computer Mediated Communication
TEXT-BASED CMC§ Asynchronous text. The first use of CMC in language teaching almost certainly came through email exchanges from teachers to students and among students within classes. Email is an example of asynchronous communication, in that the interaction is not in real time: You create and send an email, and the recipient typically gets it within seconds but may not read it or respond until much later.
§ Synchronous Text. With synchronous text, or chat, the messages are exchanged in text form, but in real time. Some of the early research on CMC was built around a type of chat program, InterChange, that was part of the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment system (www.daedalus.com). Students could carry out synchronous discussion in a computer classroom using this tool. AUDIO/VIDEO CMC Asynchronous audio. Like text, audio or video interaction can be either asynchronous or synchronous. One example of asynchronous voice interaction would be the voicemail services offered by a number of sites for free. Using this, students with voice-enabled computers can leave messages for one another or for the teacher.
CMC IN DISTANCE EDUCATION AND VIRTUAL WORLDS Distance education is increasing in education generally and language learning is no exception. While tutorial CALL material can be presented online for independent study without teachers, there are also classes that are offered to groups of students online with a live teacher's guidance. These classes can be either synchronous or asynchronous, and CMC usually plays an important role.
INTEGRATING CMC INTO ESL CLASSES It is important to recognize that synchronous CMC by definition is real time communication. Learners will be put on the spot to produce language quickly and one should expect less accuracy (including typos if in a text mode), but they will arguably be practicing something that overlaps a lot with face to face communication. Asynchronous CMC allows for more thought and planning, and thus it may be more reasonable to expect closer attention to organization and language forms.
Unit 4: CALL on the Web
Ø DISADVANTAGES OF THE WEB
Text-based material on the Web is sometimes not as easy to read as material in paper format because of font color and background choices.
Sound and video sometimes take a noticeable time to transfer, even on fast connections.
Because of this delay, interactivity is limited compared to what is possible with disks or CD-ROMs. However, increasingly Web applications (like Macromedia Flash) have interactivity without delays.
Down servers or broken links may lead to frustration.
Ø ADVANTAGES OF THE WEB
There is anytime, anywhere access (for some people at least).
There are enormous amounts of free material.
Material can be found that is current.
Language reference and other learning support materials can be found.
Student and teacher publication opportunities exist.
Ø Language support:
Ø Authentic Language Materials. There are many, many options for this--here are just a few.
Ø Lesson Plans & Projects
Ø Dedicated Language Materials & Exercises
Ø Other Resources
Unit 5: CALL and Language Skills
v ESL PORTALS
Because of the enormous number of English teachers and learners, there are quite a few multi-skill collections for ESL.,A few, such as www.manythings.org by the Kelly brothers (http://aitech.ac.jp/~lkelly/ and http://aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/) are mostly labors of love for students and colleagues around the world; often, however, these are commercial, aimed at getting "eyeballs" for advertisers. v LISTENING
Listening is potentially one of the most promising areas for CALL development. This is because multimedia computing has everything standard audio and video have with the addition of a variety of meaning technologies such as text support, hyperlinked glossaries, and even translations.
v SPEAKING
In terms of direct practice of speaking, recent developments on the web have allowed for voice chat sites which make it possible for learners and teachers to interact through the Internet in distance education courses. Asynchronous speaking practice is possible through www.wimba.com, using Internet voice mail, or simply attaching sound files to email. There has also been interest recently in having students produce and publish podcasts. v READING
Here are some other ways CALL can be used to support reading
v WRITING
Some other ways computers enhance writing instruction include the following.
v GRAMMAR
Grammar practice was perhaps the earliest use of CALL. Today grammar work is largely focused on the following:
v PRONUNCIATION
Pronunciation work is generally of three types.
· Listen, repeat/record, and compare. This option shows up in many multimedia programs and is analogous to the tape-based language lab technique in the audio-lingual method.
· Visualization: wave form, pitch contour, spectrogram. The first and last are of questionable value.
· ASR (automatic speech recognition) scoring. Here, the computer uses speech recognition software to grade accuracy.
v VOCABULARY
ypertext dictionaries/glossaries. Babylon (www.babylon.com) is a commercial memory-resident dictionary system that runs in the background on your computer; www.voycabulary.com is a web application that automatically links items in a web page to a variety of dictionaries. Talking dictionaries: Longman, Oxford, and Newbury House have learner's dictionaries with CD-ROMs that include pronunciation and sometimes other multimedia support. An online version is at www.ldoceonline.com.
Unit 6: CALL Research
v CALL RESEARCH TRENDS
Research has continued in all areas of CALL but recently has focused on several identifiable areas, such as:
- Computer mediated communication; especially, interaction in synchronous chat settings and email in tandem settings
- Visual, text and sound annotation to promote comprehension and vocabulary acquisition
- Effectiveness of online collaborative and constructivist activities, including development of communities
v SURVEY OF UNANSWERED QUESTIONS IN CALL RESEARCH
One of the major concerns that scholars seem to have upon entering this field, particularly if they are trying to develop a project for a master's or doctoral thesis, is what sorts of research questions to study.
v SUBJECT CHARACTERISTICS IN CALL RESEARCH
In 2004 I carried out a study of research articles found in four CALL journals over a 2-3 year period, focusing on subject characteristics. The overall conclusion was that "CALL research as a whole is unbalanced in the direction of the study of novices working on novel tasks or using novel applications" (Hubbard 2005: 363).
v DOING RESEARCH
There are several avenues available to teachers in the role of researchers of their own classroom or students.
- Observation. When your students are using software or doing a computer-based task in a lab or other venue where you can--watch them. You can look over their shoulder, check their interactions, and make brief notes of what you notice.
- Student surveys. Ask specific questions about usage--note that it's best to do this as soon as possible after a CALL session sense memories fade rapidly.
- Pre- and post-testing to evaluate outcomes of the use of technology.
v LOCATING RESEARCH STUDIES
Two useful sites to search are CALICO (www.calico.org), which has CALICO Journal articles over three years old freely available, and Language Learning & Technology (http://llt.msu.edu), where all the journal articles are freely available. Both sites have internal search features.
Unit 7: CALL Learner Training
Before continuing, let's consider three alternatives to CALL learner training...
· One solution is to try to build software in such a way that it adapts to the learner on a number of different levels: language proficiency, computer proficiency, learning style, topical interest, motivational type and intensity, and so on.
· A second alternative is to take the philosophical position that learners have a right to self-discovery and that left alone they will naturally move to the strategies that work for them and that are consonant with their learning style.
· A third alternative is to acknowledge that learners would profit from training but that it's just too much trouble to train them since it obviously takes a lot of time away from other aspects of language learning and there's no guarantee it will be successful.
v TECHNICAL TRAINING
Training can be divided at least into two areas: technical and pedagogical (you may recall that this was the same division as for teachers in Unit 1). Here is one example: most audio/video players, for instance (Real, QuickTime, Windows Media). v PEDAGOGICAL TRAINING
· Experience CALL yourself. Try a piece of CALL software (like Rosetta Stone) for a language you don't know, or visit a chatroom for a language you are not fluent in. · Give learners teacher training. Let them know some of what you know if they are to become more independent. Help them develop a "language learning approach" that is consistent with what you consider a valid language teaching approach.
· Use a cyclical approach. Teach a bit at a time. Don't just have a training session at the beginning and think your job is done.
· Use collaborative debriefings. Get learners to discuss their experiences, successes and failures with the CALL tasks and software in pairs or small groups.
· Teach general exploitation strategies. Show learners ways to use software to make it easier if it's too hard and harder if it's too easy, as well as how to mine the material for uses different from those intended by the developer.
