LINGUISTICS 189/289 - STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Linguistics and the Teaching of English
as a Second/Foreign Language
CALL Mini-Course
Unit 8: Conclusion
In the past seven units you have been introduced to a wide variety of applications of the compute for language teaching. In Unit 1, we talked about the history of CALL, the tutor-tool distinction, and the various roles you can play as a participant in the CALL field. Unit 2 looked at tutorial software, focusing on evaluation but also discussing issues of development and implementation. Unit 3 gave an overview of the different ways computers on a local network or the Internet can be used for communicative activities. Unit 4 introduced a number of ways in which the World Wide Web has been used either directly or indirectly in language learning, covering tutorial sites, online tools and web-based activities such as Webquests. In Unit 5, we linked computer uses in the four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and culture, through descriptions of applications and issues in each of those areas.
In the attempt to be comprehensive, the course suggested a distorted view of the field in some ways. In the past few years, there has been a much stronger interest in CMC and the web compared with tutorial CALL, particularly in TESOL. At the 2002 TESOL convention, for instance, there were 42 tool-oriented presentations compared with just 7 involving the computer in the tutorial role. A whole unit was devoted to learner training, but within CALL literature very little has been written about that topic.
Despite the desire to be comprehensive, there are a number of areas related to CALL that we either did not cover at all or only touched on. I would like to mention them here and provide some direction for future self-study.
Concordancing. Concordance programs such as Athelstan's MonoConc are tools that allow you to tap in to large collections of texts, called corpora, to discover how language is actually used. If you put in a word or phrase, for instance, these programs will search for examples of that item in context and return a listing. Although originally designed for research purposes, language teachers have adopted it as a tool for language learners. See Guy Aston's Learning with Corpora for more information.
Learning Management Systems. Learning management systems, or LMSs, include commercial systems like Blackboard and WebCT that are used either for online courses or for online elements of classroom-based courses. As the label suggests, they are used by instructors and institutions to organize course materials and assignments and maintain records of student learning activities. They have features such as discussion boards, synchronous chat and web-based testing that make them appealing for language teaching.
Computer-based Language Testing. Although testing is not a direct part of language learning, it is clearly an area of interest to language teachers. For proficiency testing, TOEFL and other tests are now offered primarily through computer at testing centers. Ordinate Corporation's PhonePass is a telephone based oral proficiency test that is entirely machine-scored using an innovative speech recognition system. Some commercial language schools and publishers use, as well as some universities like Stanford, now use online testing for placement and diagnostic purposes. Online testing and quizzing is also offered through LMSs or dedicated testing programs. The May 2001 issue of Language Learning & Technology was devoted to computer-based language testing.
Communities of Practice. While we have assumed here that you can learn about CALL through course work or self-study, another way is to interact with other language teachers who are similarly on their own. Real English Online is a Yahoo! group organized by Mike Marzio and Elizabeth Hanson-Smith devoted to video in language teaching, and it has a lot of people interested in video in CALL. The webheads, organized by Vance Stevens, is a group that focuses on CMC, including video conferencing. There are also discussion lists through CALICO, the TESOL CALL Interest Section, and TESL-L. For a list of other such "listserves" see http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/4631/listserv.htm
Teacher Education for CALL. Unit 1 touched on this area, but now that this mini-course is concluding, it's worth looking again at opportunities in teacher education. If you are looking ahead to a Master's or certificate program, it is worth checking to see which ones include technology training and what the nature of that training is. Carnegie Mellon and a number of other universities around the world offer dedicated CALL degrees. See Graham Davies' site for s listing: www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/courses.htm. There are also CALL certificate programs available for in-service teachers, such as the one at Monterey Institute of International Studies: http://maxkade.miis.edu/call_online/index.html. In finding a suitable CALL training opportunity, it is important to find one that fits your needs depending on your existing level of computer expertise. Some certificate programs and workshops in particular may focus on how to use the computer rather than why. It's best to have both.
Tracking. Tracking of student use of computer applications has been a part of CALL research since the beginning, but a lot of research, both formal and informal, has relied on other data such as pre- and post-testing, observation, think-aloud and recall protocols, and simply student attitude surveys to determine effectiveness. Tracking routines for tutorial software automatically record student use of software, and for CMC, you can keep logs of chat sessions or review emails or submissions to discussion boards. Tracking is important not only in research, but also in teacher diagnosis of student problems (with the language or the software) and in adaptive testing or intelligent tutoring. As computers become more powerful and LMSs more sophisticated, we can expect more advances in tracking. For research in particular, though, this opens up questions of privacy that must be reviewed by human subject committees.
The Future? Predictions made even 15 years ago tended to focus on more intelligent tutorial software and the promise of multimedia. We were looking for opportunities to make learning more efficient and individualized through computers. Then came the web and the spread of CMC, along with social constructivist methodology, making collaboration and communication through computers a stronger focus. I am betting on a future that has room for both. In recent presentations, Claire Bradin Siskin and I have argued for a softening of the tutor-tool distinction (Another Look at Tutorial CALL). I anticipate increased recognition that blended environments building on the complementary strengths of tutorial software, CMC, authentic language form the web, and the face to face interaction of students to teacher and students to students will yield more effective learning than any of these in isolation.