Technology in the Service of Language Learning: Trends and...

Republication from The Modern LanguageJournal, 75, 1991, 74–101.

Technology in the Service ofLanguage Learning: Trends and IssuesNINA GARRETTDepartment of Modern Languages & LinguisticsCornell UniversityIthaca, NY 14853

THIS PAPER HAS TWO PURPOSES: FIRST, ITprovides an overview, for teachers making little orno use of technology, of the kinds of technolog-ical resources currently available to support lan-guage learning and of various approaches to mak-ing use of them.1 Only brief mention is made ofthe promise of future hardware; technology thatcan be taken for granted today is already light-years ahead of the profession’s ability to integratea principled use of it into the classroom and thecurriculum. Not a review or evaluation of specificmaterials, it explores rather the pedagogical andresearch possibilities made available by techno-logical developments of the past decade. The Ap-pendix contains a bibliography of books and peri-odicals and lists of 1) organizations through whichteachers can find out more on these topics; 2)publishers and distributors of software, video andaudio; and 3) selected software programs avail-able from the major foreign language publishers.An asterisk in the text of the article itself refersthe reader to the Appendix.

Second, this paper explores some of the issueswhich surround the trend. The most obvious andimmediate, of course, is the issue of efficacy: doesusing technology actually aid language teachingand/or learning? Is it worth the time, effort, andcost? But a number of other issues have as yethardly been explored or even generally articu-lated: 1) should the technology be thought of

The Modern Language Journal, 93, Focus Issue, (2009)0026-7902/09/697–718 $1.50/0C©2009 The Modern Language Journal

as primarily assisting teaching (for example, han-dling homework, thus saving classroom time forcommunicative activities) or as directly support-ing learning (for example, allowing students toexplore cultural material as they like)? 2) whatis the relationship between a theoretically andempirically based understanding of the languagelearning process and the design and implementa-tion of technology-based materials? 3) should stu-dents work with pedagogically shaped materials ordirectly with authentic data? 4) should students’access to the material be directed or entirely un-der their own control? What cognitive strategies orproblems are implied either way? 5) what kinds ofresearch does the use of technology for languagelearning demand or enable?

These issues have no “correct” or simple an-swers; in some cases we have no answers at all, butthe questions are still necessary. Because the ques-tion of the efficacy of the technology can interferewith an objective assessment of what is available,it will be considered first.

EFFICACY

Can using the computer actually help studentslearn another language? More pointedly, can ithelp them learn to communicate in another lan-guage? Concerned teachers want research reportsto give them simple answers, but studies pub-lished so far (for an overview on this researchsee 11) are either inconclusive or flawed enoughin their methodology so that claims continue tobe asserted both ways. The real problem is that

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so general a question can probably not be re-searched with validity without first identifying andresearching all of its individual, even microscopic,components. First, research studies in the past sev-eral decades comparing foreign language teach-ing methods have proven inconclusive, and wehave good reason to believe that studies evalu-ating the efficacy of technology-as-method willinevitably be flawed by many uncontrollable vari-ables (1–2; 4–6). It is impossible to design a large-scale and comprehensive study which would beboth valid and feasible comparing the languagelearning of one randomly chosen group of stu-dents who use the computer to the learning ofothers who do not. Unfortunately, the question“Does it work?” is simply not answerable on sucha broad scale.

Second, and more important, a methodolog-ical approach is inappropriate because the useof the computer does not constitute a method. Thecomputer is rather a medium or an environ-ment in which a wide variety of methods, ap-proaches, or pedagogical philosophies may beimplemented. Computer materials could be de-signed to carry out a grammar-translation syllabus,or audio-lingual drills, or cognitive analysis of lan-guage, or a good deal of the kind of learning ac-tivities that make up a communicative syllabus.Studies comparing computer-assisted with non-computer-assisted learning per se are thereforeno more helpful than would be studies compar-ing textbook-assisted with non-textbook-assistedlearning. Instead, we need to break down the is-sue into a set of queries about interrelated andcomplex research variables: what kind of software,integrated how into what kind of syllabus, at whatlevel of language learning, for what kind of languagelearners, is likely to be effective for what specific learn-ing purposes? The research agenda suggested bythose questions cannot even be undertaken untilwe have many kinds of software, have integratedits use according to different principles into a va-riety of syllabi at a range of levels, etc. In fact,we are not yet generally agreed either on the pa-rameters by which to frame the research hypothe-ses or on the measures by which we can establishthe results. It is therefore clearly unreasonablefor the profession as a whole to demand proofthat “using the computer works” before allowingitself to become interested. We have to begin withsmall research steps by using software which isdesigned to support significant learning and in-vestigating its efficacy in local and carefully speci-fied contexts. Only the interest and commitmentof serious professionals in such controlled stud-ies will bring computer-assisted language learning

(CALL) to the point where a formal evaluative re-search agenda can be undertaken.

WHAT IS AVAILABLE? WHAT CAN BE DONEWITH IT?

Discussion of technical details and specifica-tions in this section will be brief, because hardwaremakes, models, and prices change constantly.Teachers or schools ready to purchase hardwareor software will need to discuss their particularneeds with vendors who can supply immediatedetails. This section will focus on the newer tech-nologies less familiar to foreign language teach-ers and suggest ways of integrating their use intolanguage learning. “Conventional” audio technol-ogy, that of the tape and the language lab, needsno explanation here. Newer audio labs (SONY∗,for example) are based on delivery of digitizedsound, but, although this improves the sound, itdoes not change the use to which audio work isusually put or the way it affects learning. Sourcesof audio material∗ are well known and easily ac-cessible to teachers (although the shortwave radiois often overlooked), and the machinery involvedis not generally regarded as threatening. (The useof audio devices under the control of a computerwill be dealt with in the section on interactive tech-nologies.)

Video. The use of videotape is by now alsowidely familiar to language teachers, and rapidlyincreasing numbers of schools own videotapeplayers for use by teachers in many fields. Play-ing a videotape in class is much less troublethan the “old-fashioned” equivalent of showinga 16mm movie on a projector, and visual materaihas immediate appeal to our television-orientedstudents; teachers generally fmd video an attrac-tive resource. However, the sources of video mate-rial∗ now include far more than the traditionalcommercial offerings in foreign language text-book publishers’ catalogues.

Although the greatly increased availability ofauthentic video has reduced interest in produc-ing one’s own, the value of in-house produc-tion should not be overlooked. With the adventof lightweight cameras able to use natural light,teachers and students can now produce video ma-terials of excellent quality in their own settingfor a variety of purposes. Almost all languageteachers take advantage of students’ enthusiasmfor putting on skits (their own or from litera-ture) or performing plays or songs; video record-ings of these performances can make them avail-able for use with other classes, for discussion or

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analysis, or for comparison with later perfor-mances to show language progress. Native speak-ers on campus are often delighted to participate;they can model all kinds of communicative inter-actions to demonstrate gesture, facial expression,and stance, all of which provide important par-alin guistic information on which listening com-prehension is based. At the University of Illinoisthe French department taped a series of very shortsegments demonstrating greeting behaviors in arange of social situations—between a man anda woman who know each other slightly, betweentwo men or two women who are long-time friends,between an older person and a younger, in for-mal and informal introductions, etc. Another se-ries showed a male student trying to strike upa conversation with a female student in hopesof arranging a movie date; variations includedhis being shy or pushy, the female being will-ing or stand-offish. The crucial factor in assur-ing authentic and natural behavior, both linguisticand paralin guistic, is making the performancesas spontaneous as possible. It is extremely diffi-cult to create scripts without the flavor of text-book dialogue, and it is almost impossible forstudents, even native speakers, to deliver mem-orized lines with authentic-sounding spontaneity.If native speakers “rehearse” by talking throughthe situation, the emotional interactions, and thekind of relationship to be enacted and then sim-ply act it out in the language that comes naturallyto them, the results are astonishingly realistic andof far greater use to students than all but the mostexpensive professional productions.

Videotaping of actual classes can servepedagogical purposes. Teachers are for good rea-son unwilling to interrupt the substantive andintense discussions or debates often generated inadvanced level conversation classes, but studentscan learn much from careful analysis of the dis-course and interactions; videotaping allows thatanalysis to be carried on the next day. Methodol-ogy students preparing for teaching careers can betaped during practice teaching sessions for latercriticism.

Scholars in any discipline or performers fromforeign countries in residence for a term or com-ing to campus for a particular occasion are of-ten willing to be taped giving presentations intheir native language or a (possibly somewhatsimplified) discussion of their subject in theirown language so that language programs couldgradually build up a library of poetry readings,lectures, song recitals, interviews, etc. Anotherpotential source of highly authentic and enjoy-able videotapes is a classroom of students in a

target language country; many schools in Europeand Japan are now also well equipped with video.Just as student pen-pals have for years exchangedletters, classes and schools can now exchangevideotapes. Since foreign video uses differenttechnology, one needs playback equipment specif-ically designed for the appropriate standard, buttri-standard players are available.∗

Perhaps the most exciting source of foreign lan-guage video is satellite transmission of “authentic”video, target language programs produced by andfor native speakers in their own country ratherthan for pedagogical purposes. Many schools anduniversities now have dish antennas which enablethem to receive satellite video. Copyright lawsprohibit making permanent videotape copies ofbroadcast materials, but teachers can record videotransmissions for “fair use” in classes, generally forup to ten days. The limits on fair use of live videomust be carefully observed, because the penal-ties for copyright infringement are severe and thewillingness of broadcasters to transmit these ma-terials is eroded by their lack of confidence in theprofessional ethics of recipients.

SCOLA∗ (Satellite Communications for Learn-ing Worldwide) is an organization of schoolsinterested in the use of satellite technology for en-hancing education in many different institutionalcontexts. It receives video broadcasts from aroundthe world and rebroad-casts them for reception bymember institutions for use in their classes and byindividual students. Membership costs are calcu-lated on the basis of student enrollment, so theyvary widely across institutions. The NY Networkat SUNY-Albany∗ is pursuing plans for a Soviet TVsatellite service, which would broadcast an hour oflive Soviet TV per day to subscribing institutions.

The extent to which authentic video can begenuinely integrated into a language course (asopposed to being merely brought in as an amus-ing extra to fill time) depends on teachers’ abilityto gauge the comprehensibility of the languagecontent and the intrinsic interest of the materialfor their classes. Preparation of adequate supportmaterials is extremely time consuming, but with-out glosses, notes, comprehension questions, etc.,for students to use either before viewing the videoor in doing assignments on it, substantive discus-sions and classroom activities are unlikely. With-out these efforts, the most authentic linguistic andcultural material in the world is likely to be re-garded passively by the students, not integratedinto learning, and to be of little long-term value.

Several major projects now make available for-eign video in various forms accompanied by suchactivities. France-TV Magazine∗ broadcasts video


produced in France through a special subscrip-tion service on PBS; faculty members from theUniversity of Maryland and nearby high schoolsproduce a wide variety of instructional materialsto accompany each broadcast. A companion pro-gram in German began in January of last year.

The PICS∗ project (Project for InternationalCommunication Studies) at the University of Iowawas developed as a solution to a number of theproblems encountered in making use of authenticvideo. Ongoing connections with major video pro-ducers in Europe have been established, throughwhich the project receives significant amounts ofvideo materials created for regular broadcastingin the country of origin, together with copyrightpermission to make these materials available tolanguage teachers in this country in a varietyof forms. Video modules of all kinds in French,German, and Spanish are created on both video-tape and videodisk, and PICS project staff workswith interested faculty at other institutions to pre-pare ancillary materials (such as glossaries, scripts,computer exercises) at appropriate pedagogicallevels. These video selections of news, entertain-ment, advertising, and documentaries provide anextremely rich source of culturally meaningfulmaterial which can become a permanent part ofa foreign language program.

Videodisks are often regarded as useful only inconnection with a computer, but in fact videodiskplayers can also be controlled with a “paddle,” ahand-held control device for accessing the framedesired. Delivery systems for videodisk need nottherefore be very expensive. A videodisk is an iri-descent metal or metallicized plastic disk abouttwelve inches across which can hold thirty minutesper side of video plus two audio tracks of thirtyminutes each, or approximately 52,000 slides; anyspecified slide or frame or video segment can beaccessed instantaneously. Many videodisks createdfor language learning purposes use the second au-dio track for a simplified target language (or En-glish) version of the target language soundtrackthat accompanies the video. (The contents of avideodisk cannot be altered or added to after ithas been pressed, so teachers cannot decide forthemselves what they would like to have on thesecond track.)

Attitudes Toward Audio/Video and Computers.The contrast in teachers’ attitudes toward audioand video on the one hand and computers onthe other is striking. Audio has been with us fordecades, and although language lab technology iscertainly more sophisticated now, the general con-cept of delivering audio enhancement to standard

text materials is familiar. Many students own theirown portable cassette players, to the extent thatsome colleges and universities faced with obsoleteaudio labs (Smith College and Brown University,for example) have opted not to replace them buthave instead established systems whereby studentsborrow or buy the standard language tapes to playon their own equipment; students who do not ownthem may borrow tape players as well. On theother hand, other institutions (the University ofIllinois, for example) report a resurgence of inter-est in audio lab use, especially for less commonlytaught languages. Videotape players, too, are al-ready so widely owned, not only in schools but alsoby the general public, that the machinery is notregarded as particularly intimidating. Video in aforeign language is intuitively appealing to lan-guage teachers and students alike (much more sothan audio), and there is very little controversyabout its value, although there is little hard re-search on its use. Teachers may not always use au-dio and video with maximum efficiency or imag-ination, but they may use them without anxiety.

Computers, by contrast, cannot yet be taken forgranted in every school or every household; theyare much more expensive and have an elitist aura,and to most teachers the idea of programmingis daunting. As the following discussion shouldmake clear, however, much of the anxiety is un-necessary, since teachers do not need to be ableto program in order to be able to tailor or even cre-ate software suitable for their own students’ use.

Computers. Touching briefly on the issue ofhardware choice, publishers of FL software agreethat the Apple II series of computers still domi-nates the secondary schools, and the largest seg-ment of commercially available software is writ-ten for them. Most FL software available for theApple Ils consists of drill and practice in elemen-tary grammar and vocabulary. This simplicity isdue partly to machine limitations and partly tothe early stage of instructional design at whichit was conceived. Computer-assisted education isstill in its infancy and, like all infants, grows quicklyand beyond all recognition; it is hard for schooladministrators to accept that the expensive ma-chinery bought only a few years ago is alreadyobsolete, and they understandably feel that whenthe equipment must be replaced the new ma-chines must at least run the school’s accumulatedsoftware. The Apple IIGS was introduced to en-able schools to run old Apple software on newermachines, but so far, apparendy, little FL softwarehas been written to take advantage of its expandedcapabilities.2 Unfortunately, most of the FL

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software written for the older Apples is neitherworth keeping nor worth using as an argument forcompatible hardware upgrading; by today’s stan-dards early programs allow only a fairly crude re-alization of the potential of CALL. Screen resolu-tion is poor, so that accents and even letters may bedifficult to see clearly; more serious, the pedagogi-cal value of the programs is very limited. The 256Kmemory of the IIGS and the basic IBM-PC micro-computer (and its many clones) is now generallyaccepted as a minimum standard, and most IBM-compatible commercial FL software packagesrequire only 256K to run. Publishers often bringout simultaneous versions of materials for a vari-ety of machines, but teachers must still be carefulabout accepting at face value claims about com-patibility; not every lesson programmed for theIBM-PC will run smoothly on every PC clone, orvice versa.

Discussions with publishers, witıi FL faculty atCALICO∗ (Computer Assisted Language Instruc-tion Consortium) meetings, and with academiccomputing staff who convene at EDUCOM∗ indi-cate that in colleges and universities, computerfacilities for language departments (or the hu-manities generally) tend to be equipped with IBMor compatible machines or with the Apple Mac-intosh (which is not compatible either with theApple II series or with IBM-type machines) orwith both. Smaller institutions have sometimeselected to buy and support only one type; SmithCollege, for example, formerly supported onlyIBM-type machines for students, while Bryn Mawrsupported student purchase and use only of theMacintosh. However, both these institutions, likemost larger ones, have found it necessary to sup-port a variety of machines, even though thatsupport—maintaining the hardware and the fa-cilities, acquiring support software, training peo-ple to help and instruct inexperienced users—requires serious and expensive institutional com-mitment. IBM, Apple, and AT&T have all mademajor gifts of equipment to many campusesand have established ongoing grant programsto fund the development of educational soft-ware as the best way to sell more of their hard-ware. IBM, for example, instituted its AdvancedEducation Projects program in 1985 with hard-ware gifts to nineteen major campuses (includ-ing the Ivy League schools and a number ofstate universities including Illinois, Minnesota,Wisconsin, Texas, Washington, and North Car-olina, among others), and the software createdin the course of these projects is widely avail-able, sometimes in pilot form, through a dis-tribution system called WISC-WARE∗ (see also

p. 98). Apple began in 1988 to encourage institu-tional applications to its “Apple Seedlings” projectfor gifts of Macintosh equipment for educationalsoftware development; AT&T has also issued invi-tations at some campuses for research and devel-opment proposals.

Those who need to decide on major hardwarepurchases are usually advised to consider first thesoftware they want to run and buy the machinesthat run it. In general that is good advice, butin education (perhaps especially in language ed-ucation) the existing software does not yet ad-equately represent the capabilities of the cur-rent hardware. (Some teachers, after examiningthe software, decide against purchasing any hard-ware.) At this stage of CALL, the best decisionsare likely to be made by language teachers whohave: 1) considerable classroom teaching experi-ence; 2) broad familiarity with available softwareand with current pedagogical uses of it in otherlanguage programs; and 3) access to up-to-datetechnical information about hardware. Obviouslyfew teachers can as yet lay claim to that combinedexpertise, but the International Association ofLearning Labs (IALL)∗ has a list of consul-tants, and some major language laboratories haveenough experience with computers in languageteaching so that their staff members can field in-quiries, although some universities’ humanitiescomputing centers handle instructional comput-ing, but many address the computing problems ofthe scholar and’researcher, rather than those ofthe language teacher.

Classroom Use vs. Lab Settings. In most schools,of course, FL teachers do not have a major voicein deciding which hardware should be purchased.Neither, usually, do they have much say in estab-lishing the configuration of computers on whichthey and/or their students will work; they mayhave access to one in the department office, orthree in the back of the classroom, or ten in the li-brary or media center for individual use, or twentyin a laboratory-classroom to which they may taketheir classes one period per week. What can theydo under each of these circumstances?3

Even in the absence of a budget for student-use software, a single computer in an office canstill be extremely helpful to teachers at any levelin preparing handouts, particularly for less com-monly taught languages or for students at agelevels for which print materials are scarce or unsat-isfactory. Most of the major word-processors canhandle the special characters and accents of thecommonly taught languages (see the Modern Lan-guage Journal 73.1, “Notes & News”), and several


allow text creation in an astonishing number ofnon-Roman alphabets (e.g., Multi-Lingual Scholar,Gamma Productions∗). Of course, one needs notonly the word-processing software but also an ap-propriately equipped printer.

Most experienced teachers develop over theyears large files of dittoed exercises and quizzes,and they are nonetheless resigned to finding ev-ery year that last year’s version is not quite right.Data base software makes possible the compila-tion of infinitely revisable sets of items and ques-tions, from which one can select and print outthose appropriate to a particular occasion. Sucha program can also be directed to select items atrandom to combine in a printout or to random-ize the order of items, so that different quizzes canautomatically be generated from the same set forthose first period and fifth period classes.

Calculating grades is a chore for which thecomputer is ideally suited, and numerous grade-book programs are available which offer advan-tages well beyond those of a calculator. Not only isthe computer immune to the fatigue that sets inthe night before grades are due, but it also makeseasy any interim calculations requested by bor-derline students or anxious parents. In many pro-grams teachers can specify the weighting for eachgrade or average and develop their own formu-las. (A review of grade-book programs for AppleII machines appeared in Foreign Language Annals[February 1990]).

Even a single computer can be used in the class-room with students; with the lesson visible on alarge computer monitor or a computer screenprojector, the teacher (or designated students inturn) can type in responses called out by the oth-ers. For example, some vocabulary or grammardrills, especially those programmed to seem likegames, lend themselves to team competition ac-tivities in class. Other software packages presentsimulated problem situations or games, often withintriguing graphic effects, and such “lessons” canencourage lively discussions in the target languageas students debate the appropriate input. (TomSnyder Productions∗ specializes in such packages,although this author is not aware of any specif-ically designed for FL education as yet.) Finally,students can even learn grammar by analyzing andcriticizing (under the teacher’s guidance) the waya computer lesson carries out error analysis andarrives at feedback messages.

Classrooms equipped with a small number ofcomputers can provide a solution to a number ofcommon language teaching problems. Studentswho need individual help with a particular prob-lem or who must make up for an absence can

do tutorials or homework assignments on thecomputers during study periods or after schoolwith only intermittent attention from the teacher.In class, students who complete an activity earlycan be allowed to amuse themselves with game-format or problem-solving software apart from theothers—but only with programs whose sound ef-fects can be turned off! Class activities groupingthree or four students around each computer canbe based on such software; teachers who have triedthis often comment on the surprising amount oftarget language discussion thus generated. (Thisuse also answers the philosophical objection thatlanguage should be engaged in as an interactionbetween people, not between a person and a ma-chine.) In secondary schools with small programsteachers are often required to teach two differentlanguage classes in the same room at the sametime; the availability of computers can allow theteacher to engage in communicative activities withone group while the other is absorbed in writing,homework, problem-solving, or games.

The most common placing of computers at thepostsecondary level is in a lab or media center towhich students have independent access, ratherthan in a lab reserved for scheduled class use.(The latter arrangement is more common in sec-ondary schools.) In some ways this configurationis easiest for teachers who prefer not to becomedirectly involved with CALL themselves; they canassign homework to be done on the computer,without relating its use directly to classroom activi-ties. However, the author would argue that the fullbenefits of CALL will not be realized until its use isfully integrated with classroom work on the basisof theoretically motivated research on the kindsof learning activities most enhanced by technol-ogy and those best undertaken without it. Usingthe computer for homework is probably the firstimplementation to occur to the technologicallyinexperienced teacher and is still the most com-mon. Indeed, it is an altogether valid one; studentscan learn much more from software which givesaccurate and individualized feedback than fromworkbook or textbook exercises corrected collec-tively in class or later by the teacher. Class timeis then freed for more personal and communica-tive activities. However, using the computer onlyfor grammar homework by no means exhausts thepossibilities and should not be taken as its majoruse (see the discussion below of software designedfor other kinds of learning).

Networks and File Servers. Some computer labsor media centers have local area networks (LANs),in which several microcomputers are linked so

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that they can run the same program at the sametime, and some software publishers offer specialpricing for packages which will be so installed.One network strategy involves loading all soft-ware used in the lab onto a file server, which isone machine with much greater capacity thanstudent workstations. Students with appropriateaccess codes can then work on their own, down-loading the software they want to work on fromthe server to networked machines in the labor even elsewhere on campus, but they cannotchange or copy it. Some file servers allow a givenpackage to be used only by one person at a time,which make them unsuitable for classroom use orfor lab situations in which several students maybe doing homework simultaneously. Servers canalso be extremely slow when data must be con-stantly read from and written to the hard disk.Teachers interested in setting up networks intheir computer labs should research these prob-lems carefully. Pricing strategies for networks varywidely and must be negotiated for each particularsituation.

A full-fledged campus network also allowsteachers and students to communicate with eachother outside of class, and this then makes pos-sible a variety of foreign-language-using activities.John Barson (Stanford) has developed a broadrange of writing and communication activities forhis students, and with Judith Frommer (Harvard)is now working out the cross-country publicationof a student newspaper in French. Karen Smith(University of Arizona) uses “conferencing” tech-niques on the university VAX (mainframe) systemas the medium for students’ interpersonal corre-spondence in Spanish.

The Computer Alone or Linked to Other Technolo-gies. Some teachers and materials developershave become so enamored of video that they seethe computer by itself as a sterile and in-authenticenvironment for language learning. No downplay-ing of the importance of video need be impliedby an insistence on the equal importance of thecomputer itself in language learning and teach-ing. Even though it cannot present spontaneousoral interpersonal communication in its full cul-tural context, that is not the only form of lan-guage of interest to language teachers or indeedto many language learners. Text-based activities,reading and writing, are integral to virtually everylanguage course beyond its first beginnings. Someapplications of technology that go beyond theelementary-level concern with grammar and vo-cabulary are explored below; suffice it here to in-sist that although the addition of audio and video

capabilities to the computer make it a rich envi-ronment for learning, the computer in its ownright should not be dismissed as unimportant.Another major reason for continuing efforts toimprove computer lesson design is its central func-tion in organizing and controlling interactive au-dio and video configurations: the most authenticand expensively produced audio and video mate-rials will still make for mediocre language lessonsif the computer program which presents them ispoorly designed.

COMPUTER-MEDIATED TECHNOLOGIES

The multiple advantages of presenting stu-dents with authentic oral language and thevisual/cultural context for communication areso obvious that few language teachers can seedemonstrations of interactive audio and videowithout feeling that these’ technologies must haveenormous beneficial impact on students’ acqui-sition of communicative proficiency. As yet fewinstitutions have the facilities for presenting stu-dents with a large-scale, fully interactive languagelearning environment, but because of significantadvances in this area teachers should be intro-duced to its potential.

The term “interactive” is used with two ratherdifferent meanings in discussions of technology-based language learning. In the phrases “interac-tive audio” and “interactive video” the word refersto the interaction between the two devices, themachine which delivers the sound or picture andthe computer which controls that machine andmay also deliver textual material, on its screen, toaccompany or alternate with the audio or videopresentation. When used as an adjective for a pro-gram or a lesson (as in “a highly interactive les-son”), however, it tends to refer to the degree ofinteractiveness between the student user and thecomputer. (In this sense it can be used whether ornot audio or video are part of the configuration.)In neither use should we take it for granted that“very interactive” is automatically better than “notvery interactive.” A high degree of interaction be-tween the computer and another device may stillbe slow and crude; a high degree of interactionbetween student and computer may mean onlythat the student keeps pressing the Enter key; itdoes not guarantee a complex and challengingrelationship between the student’s input and thecomputer’s response.

Interactive Audio. Interactive audio can beachieved via several different technologies.


Computers can be equipped to operate taperecorders, and if: 1) the computer lesson isstrongly linear in design and; 2) the tape mate-rial is carefully sequenced so that little rewindingis required, this configuration can be quite effi-cient and is likely to be perceived by students asmore interesting and of more assistance to learn-ing than is audio by itself. Nonetheless, access tothe audio segments cannot be as fast as one wouldlike and, over time, with even slight stretching ofthe tape, the accuracy with which the computercontrols the access to the desired segment candeteriorate.

The technical research on speech synthesis (aprocess whereby the computer itself reads codeand converts it into electronic sound) is alreadywell advanced but not yet at a stage where it canreliably render a target language accent authen-tic enough for language teaching. The “random-access” audio device was developed to solve thisproblem: a fourteen-inch disk of the same mate-rial as audiotape, which can hold thirty minutesof recorded material, is “read” by a computer-controlled head. (The sound is produced by realpeople and recorded just as in a traditional taperecording; this is “analogue” sound, not synthe-sized.) Any desired bit of sound can be accessed inabout one-fourth of a second, so that students canbranch as they like through a computer lesson andalways have access to the accompanying sound seg-ments. They can record their own voices on a sep-arate track of the disk for comparison with therecorded voice; each student’s recording disap-pears from the disk when the computer is turnedoff. Mastering the audio disks from tape can bedone in-house, and disks can be re-recorded, er-rors corrected, etc., although it is tedious. Unfor-tunately, random-access audio disk players are ex-pensive (currently about $2,000 each) and havenot been widely purchased, nor have many lan-guage course materials been developed for them,except at the University of Illinois, where it hasbeen in use with the PLATO system for many yearsand has also been used with the IBM-PC in mate-rials development projects in Swahili, Wolof, andKorean. This technology is probably already obso-lete in light of recent work in sound digitization.

Digitization, the same process which recordsmusic on compact disks for home stereo sets, isoccasioning great excitement in educational au-dio technology. The analogue signal of a voicerecording (or music) is converted into a digitalcode, which is read by the computer and recon-verted into sound. The latest generation of com-puters has as standard equipment speakers whichcommonly produce a variety of sounds to accom-

pany lessons (musical tones, beeps, buzzes), andthese speakers can also deliver digitized speech(created on a special recording device and storedon a disk or in computer memory) with extremelygood fidelity and as good an accent as the personrecording. The recorders which interface with theMacintosh (for example, the MacRecorder) aresmall, easy to use, and inexpensive, and author-ing systems such as HyperCard (see section onAuthoring below) make the integration of soundinto the computer lesson very easy. IBM machinesneed a special card to carry out the signal conver-sion; at the moment that technology is less friendlythan that of the Macintosh but is capable of betterquality sound. Given the high degree of interestin this area and the intense competition amonghardware manufacturers, the audio situation canbe expected to change rapidly. The serious hin-drance to large-scale development of interactiveaudio materials via digitized sound is, at present,the disk space consumed by sound; to add muchspoken material to computer drills (for example,sentences using words in context) would requireevery user’s machine to have a hard disk. Intensivework is already underway to develop better tech-niques for compressing the digitized sound signal,but beyond a certain point the compression de-grades the signal to the point where the accuracyof the phonetic representation is unacceptable.Not until the technology for large memory stor-age becomes very cheap (for example, until mi-crocomputers are regularly equipped with harddisks of twenty megabytes or more) or techniquesfor sound compression are greatly improved canwe expect rapid development of interactive au-dio language materials. CD-ROM (Compact DiskRead-Only Memory) allows the storage of aston-ishing amounts of text data on a single CD, butagain, the audio capability is much more limited,and the data cannot be freely manipulated. Wemust choose the technology to fit the task: toexpose students to large amounts of natural lan-guage audio input, we need tape, but digitizedsound controlled by the computer can provide avaluable way of working intensively with selectedaudio segments. Moreover, a few minutes of audiocan be the basis for hours of lesson materials.

Interactive Video. Interactive video, too, canbe achieved via tape; computers can control thewinding and rewinding. Again, if the materials arewell planned, the delays need not be perceivedas too intrusive. Tape use is likely to continueto be important even when videodisk technol-ogy becomes cheaper and more widely accessi-ble, because it makes possible the integration of

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up-to-the-minute video materials into lessons; withthe aid of a simple authoring system and a stan-dard format for computer-controlled vocabularyhelp, cultural notes, and comprehension ques-tions, a tape of today’s satellite-broadcast newscan be plugged into next week’s interactive listen-ing comprehension lesson. The tape can then bereused for the next lesson. In contrast, creating avideodisk takes months and results in permanentmaterial, which is illegal unless copyright permis-sion has been previously obtained.

Nonetheless, for most language teachers inter-active video implies the use of videodisk under thecontrol of a computer. At the same time, of course,one can provide computer-based textual materialof all kinds to alternate with the video on the com-puter screen as desired. Students could be givenaccess to a transcript of the scene; help with vocab-ulary, idioms, grammar, or even a translation; cul-tural notes; or comprehension questions, as wellas options for replaying certain segments. (Re-member that the pedagogical value or interest ofthe lesson may be quite independent of the qual-ity of the video material and of the smoodmess ofthe technological interaction.)

Videodisks are not yet widely available, but theycan be expected to appear fairly rapidly. Produc-ing a videotape to be pressed on a disk demandsnear-professional expertise, and the disk itselfmust be produced commercially; once pressed,it cannot be altered. Creating a trial copy costsabout $300; a master disk for mass productioncosts about $1,800. After that, however, individualdisks made from the master may cost as little as$25, depending on the size of the order. Once thedevelopers have geared up, therefore, and oncevideodisk players are common property, a greatdeal of exciting material should be available atrelatively low cost.

SOFTWARE

Preview and Purchase Agreements. All the above-mentioned possibilities for using computersdepend, of course, on the availability of the ap-propriate software, and a discussion of that prob-lem alone could fill many pages. A regular pe-rusal of publishers’ catalogues is necessary to keepabreast of rapidly changing offerings, and directexamination of packages is extremely desirable,since descriptions and claims, even when writ-ten by objective reviewers, may be confusing oropaque to those inexperienced in evaluating soft-ware. Teachers should request materials to be sentfor thirty-day approval periods. Although some

publishers prefer to send partial or demo ver-sions for fear of illegal copying, inexperiencedevaluators may find it difficult to tell from ademo exactly how the software really functions.No teacher should engage in or allow studentsto engage in illegal software copying. Not only isdoing so a criminal act, but it is against our ownprofessional interests: in the long run; softwarepiracy guarantees that publishers will be unwill-ing to invest in the development of top-qualitysoftware.

Publishers often offer software for multiple-student use, whether or not a network is involved,under a variety of agreements which reduce thepurchase price considerably. A site license priceis based on the number of computers on whichthe package will be running or sometimes on thenumber of students in the courses for which it willbe used. Teachers who are interested in a type ofpurchase agreement not listed with a given pack-age’s price should try to negotiate one with thepublisher.

General Categories of Software . Most commerciallanguage software still focuses on drilling vocab-ulary and grammar at the first-year level (evenmost of the “games” are just drills with frills). Thestandard five-part categorization into tutorials,drills, games, simulations, and problem-solving isso widely discussed in the literature as to needno exploration here. True grammar tutorials—programs which introduce, fully explain, andpractice a structure—are less well representedthan drills, because software authors tend to as-sume that grammar is presented by the teacheror the text so that students need only a reminderto preface a drill. However, Dominguez’ SpanishMicroTutor (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich∗), whichwon a Distinguished Software award from NCRIP-TAL/ EDUCOM∗ in 1989, and Clef (Universityof Western Ontario) are notable examples of thisapproach.

Textbook Accompaniments vs. Free-Standing Soft-ware . Many textbook publishers are now offeringwith their standard texts “electronic workbook”software, in some cases for a variety of machines,just as they offer audiotapes and regular work-books. As discussed above, these represent thesimplest implementation of the computer, anddepending on the sophistication of the exerciseformat and the competence of the programmingthey may be quite worthwhile. Obviously, though,they have the good and bad features of the orig-inal exercises (and may in addition give seri-ously inadequate or misleading feedback which is


sometimes worse than none), and they certainlydo not represent the full range of the technology’scapabilities. (See 11 for a review which examinesa text-specific package in the context of a discus-sion of the advantages of these vs. free-standingpackages.) Free-standing grammar or vocabularysoftware not developed in conjunction with a text-book may be published as single disks coveringspecific topics or in sets; some large sets addressall the major grammar structures of a given lan-guage, to be used for review or reference pur-poses. A wide variety of the other categories canbe found in free-standing packages.

The Four Skills. The “four skills” provide a fa-miliar framework for examining the instructionalpotential of the available hardware and software(12). Speaking has had top priority in many pro-grams for some time now, but the computer isfar from ready to substitute for a human beingin spontaneous authentic communication. Manyother kinds of learning and practice may well helpstudents lay the groundwork for speaking profi-ciency, but we do not yet have good research dataon which ones or how they should be organized.Most teachers believe that a certain amount ofstructured work on grammar and vocabulary isnecessary, so that “communicative practice” onthe computer may contribute significantly if indi-rectly. Any activity which provokes thinking in thetarget language can be an important precursor tospeaking. Moreover, the computer’s ability to pro-vide the stimulus for inter-student target languagediscussion should not be overlooked.

Listening practice requires audio either on itsown, in the context of video, or interfaced withthe computer. Given the often dismal track recordof self-contained audio in the past, many teach-ers are enthusiastic about the newer technologies’ability to enrich listening activities. Video can pro-vide the vivid communicative context; Wakefield(Minnesota) has developed videodisk-based lis-tening comprehension materials in German. Heargues convincingly that listening without a vi-sual context is communicatively inauthentic (ex-cept on the telephone or radio) and unreasonablydifficult for learners. The computer can providetextual support for listening (transcripts, glossaryhelp, structural clues), which is particularly valu-able at upper levels of language study where lit-eracy and knowledge of formal language play amuch greater role in comprehension.

Reading comprehension is the skill for whichthe computer is most obviously suited. It is also anarea of pedagogical theory which has changed a

great deal in the past decade, and teachers look-ing for computer-based reading comprehensionmaterials should be aware of the quite differentkinds of helps that can be offered and the theoret-ical basis for the difference. Traditionally, readingcomprehension has been seen as a kind of decod-ing, where the most important help is lexical, andprograms designed from this perspective can beextremely sophisticated in the ways they allow stu-dents to call up literal, idiomatic, or contextuallysensitive translation equivalents. However, recenttheoretical work on reading has downplayed thevalue of lexical decoding and has focused on thewide variety of strategies employed by readers—skimming, scanning, inferring, predicting, etc. Inprograms designed from this perspective the com-puter can highlight the appropriate textual cluesto these strategies or use automatic timing to pacea learner through a text for various purposes. Inboth kinds of lesson, comprehension questionscan be designed so that computer feedback to aninadequate response is not just “yes” or “no” buta highlighting of the text segments on which itshould have been based. Major projects develop-ing authoring systems for reading comprehensionmaterials development are underway at the Uni-versity of Minnesota under the direction of DaleLange (for the IBM), at the University of Iowa un-der the direction of Geoffrey Hope (for the Mac-intosh), and at the University of Western Ontariounder Glyn Holmes.

The greatest value of a good software programfor creating reading comprehension lessons isthat it can allow the teacher to convert an at-tractive text into a “graded reader” with preciselythe amount and kind of help needed by a partic-ular class. This is particularly important for theless commonly taught languages, for which littlecommercial material is available. Reading lessonsat several levels of difficulty can be prepared forthe same text for use by both intermediate andadvanced classes, with quite different help avail-able to each. Favorite literary texts that are outof print or have never been published for the ed-ucational market, or current newspaper articles,can be fully supported. The authoring facility oreditor of such a program should make it possi-ble for teachers (or their assistants) to do littlemore than type in a text and specify the appro-priate helps. Longer texts can be entered muchmore efficiently into the computer with an op-tical scanner, a device which resembles a copy-ing machine but which translates the text itreads into computer characters which can thenbe edited or otherwise reworked with one’s own

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word-processor. (Copyright permission must beobtained.)

Writing is from one perspective a natural ac-tivity for students to undertake on the computer;after all, it is the one activity for which a largenumber of teachers use a computer themselves.(Even faculty members who are opposed to us-ing technology in teaching are often enthusiasticabout word-processing.) In one sense any lessonwhich requires typing in the target language, evenif it is only in grammar or vocabulary drills, isgiving some practice in writing. A different com-ponent of the writing skill could be practicedin lessons which ask students to unscramble sen-tences or paragraphs or to translate from English(an activity frowned upon by many teachers, butstill an extremely useful outside-of-class exercise).Wherever the desired output can be exactly speci-fied as an anticipated response, the computer canrespond to student writing, in as much detail asthe lesson designer desires: the computer simplycompares the student’s input with an internal rep-resentation of the correct answer. If it also hasan internal representation of a set of anticipatedwrong answers, the computer can be programmedto respond specifically to a variety of errors.

But software design and programming have notyet arrived at the point where a lesson can ac-curately judge every detail of a student’s sponta-neously produced writing. Some word-processorsnow have spelling-checkers in the common lan-guages, but some teachers have pedagogical ob-jections, wondering how students will ever learnto spell, if all their mistakes can be found (and, insome word-processors, corrected) automatically.Although a great deal of extremely interestingwork is being done at many universities (CarnegieMellon, MIT, Illinois, Guelph) in the develop-ment of parsers (programs which can automati-cally analyze the grammar of a sentence), noneof these is large scale enough or sophisticatedenough to deal with more than a narrowly defineddomain of language.

However, language educators are increasinglyinterested in using computers to teach writing inmuch the same way already being done in theteaching of English. Many universities have devel-oped large-scale programs in English compositionor rhetoric which are heavily computer-based (forexample, Illinois and Carnegie Mellon). Studentslearn to use writers’ helper programs for develop-ing their ideas and the structure of their compo-sitions and word-processing packages for writing,revising, and editing them. The final version isthen delivered to the instructor either on disk orprinted out. The same kind of work can easily be

imagined in a FL program with a word-processorand printer that can handle the requisite accentsand special characters.

But supporting free writing in a foreign lan-guage requires different and much greater re-sources than in the native language. ThoughEnglish composition software programs some-times include a thesaurus, FL students have muchgreater need for lexical help, and students writ-ing in their native language do not need refer-ences for basic morphology and syntax. One ofthe most interesting FL programs commerciallyavailable (it won a 1988 EDUCOM/NCRIPTALHigher Education Software Award) is Systeme D(Heinle∗), a “writing assistant for French” whichis a basic French word-processing program withvery fast access to a 4,300-word lexicon includingusage examples, a full verb conjugator, referencegrammar with examples and notes, and themat-ically related groups of words and expressionsfor a large number of conversational functions,all of these accessible from virtually anywhere inthe program. Students thus have at their finger-tips everything they need to write compositionsfor elementary or intermediate French. The pro-gram includes no feedback facility, so teachers cando what they like with printouts of the composi-tions. (Companion versions in Spanish and Ger-man are under development.) Now that computerFL dictionaries are available (CALI∗), we can lookforward to lessons which streamline students’ ac-cess to these in the course of reading and writingassignments.

Advanced Study. The use of language softwareas a tool or resource rather than as tutor ordrill-master points to a rapidly growing area ofinterest. Some of the most interesting technology-based material in other disciplines uses the com-puter (with or without interactive technologies)not as a device for delivering instruction but asa richly supportive environment for learning, asa medium not for the teacher presentation andlearner drilling of pedagogically selected factsabout a field of study, but for the learners’ ex-ploration of the primary data of the field. Thatis, students work with programs which do not somuch teach them facts about chemistry or historyor math but rather lead them to think and behavelike chemists, historians, or mathematicians. Theimplication for language education is the possibil-ity that researchers could use technology to cre-ate an environment in which students might learnsome of what is involved in behaving like nativespeakers or, at later levels of study, like scholars oflanguage or literature.


Advanced level undergraduates and graduatestudents can be offered the opportunity to use thetechnology to deal with authentic data themselves,even to undertake original research. For example,Garotd Davis (Brigham Young University) teachesan undergraduate course on Faust in which stu-dents are taught to use WordCruncher (CALI), aprogram which allows the development of sophis-ticated concordances. Students are given paper-writing assignments based on suggested searches.Other text-analysis programs and scholars’ toolsare arriving rapidly on the scene, and their useshould be integrated into upper-level courses fortwo reasons: first, a great deal of language learn-ing takes place when the learning effort focusesnot on the language itself but on some taskwhich the use of the language accomplishes, and,second, in today’s job market familiarity with ad-vanced technologies, for both teaching and re-search purposes, is a significant advantage to anew PhD.

Although the four skills are not by any meansfully developed in the first two years of languagestudy, after that the pedagogical focus, for thosestudents who continue, shifts largely to the devel-opment of the ability to read, discuss, analyze, andcriticize literature. Part of the bias against technol-ogy on the part of many postsecondary languagefaculty stems from the fact that as a teaching toolit has so far been used almost entirely in teach-ing language, which is perceived in many depart-ments as less important, less intellectually inter-esting, than teaching literature. Quite aside fromthe justification for that perception, the technol-ogy can in fact facilitate the move from a focus onlanguage to a focus on literature. For example,authoring systems mentioned above for creatingreading comprehension materials could allow thepreparation of lessons helping students make thetransition from pre-digested or specially preparedreading texts to original literary texts of all kinds.An advanced version of a writing program likeSysteme D, with lexical, syntactic, and discourse or-ganization helps at advanced levels, could providethe reference language data which would enablea student to write a literary essay as well as a DearAbby letter.

A videodisk holding up to 52,000 slides couldbe a fantastic resource for a whole range of ad-vanced courses, within departments and for cross-disciplinary courses. This resource can be farmore than an expensive new way to deliver prettypictures; it can bring new intellectual and culturaldimensions to literary study. A course on Germanliterature of the Jugendstil period or on Frenchsurrealist poetry, for example, is intellectually in-

complete without visual material. Most languagedepartments offer courses on culture and civiliza-tion for which easy access to visual and audiomaterial is absolutely essential, but many teach-ers have neither the cultural background nor theinstitutional resources to pull together the de-sired collection, nor any easy way to provide eachstudent with the appropriate cultural notes andtextual references. One videodisk could holdthe visual material for dozens of computer-basedlesson modules, with study aids such as cross-reference suggestions and leading questions. Asfor moving video, although the thirty-minutevideo capacity of the disk does not allow easy deliv-ery of entire performances of plays, it is ideal forcomparing segments or for developing in-depthanalysis of scenes which the student may need toview repeatedly or in juxtaposition with variousother materials. Culture courses which are oftenelected to fill general education or humanitiesrequirements could be supported by two sets ofaudio and video materials, in the appropriate lan-guage as well as in English, so as to make themboth more broadly useful and more demandingfor the departmental major.

The concept of hypertext and the availabilityof programs supporting the creation of hypertextmaterials has produced a surge of interest in thedevelopment of a new kind of CALL software. Hy-pertext refers to a collection of various text ma-terials, related in complex ways, which are notdesigned to be read in linear fashion, from begin-ning to end, but explored in an almost infinitenumber of different ways through complex cross-referencing. By analogy, hypermedia programsalso make easy the integration into this kind ofbranching structure of audio and video materi-als (as well as graphics) along with text. The ba-sic nature of hypertext and hypermedia programsmakes them particularly suitable for the presenta-tion of material for students to explore as theychoose. In a reading comprehension presenta-tion, for example, the program might allow thestudent to select certain words with a mouse orcursor and be taken directly to a synonym, para-phrase, translation, grammatical analysis, map,picture, audio rendition, or cultural note. Any ofthese could then offer links to other informationor back to the original text. In reading a liter-ary text the student could call up biographicalinformation on the author; explanation of sym-bolism; historical, social, or political contexts; in-terpretations offered by one critical theory or an-other; or information on other works publishedin that period in other literatures, particularly rel-evant works of art or music. The possibilities are

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intoxicating. Hypertext programs can also be usedto create materials structured as lessons, withanswer-judging and feedback. Novice lesson au-thors can learn to create very simple lesson mate-rials in about two weeks of intensive effort.

The concept of hypertext has been familiarto computer scientists for several decades, butbecame accessible to non-expert developers ofcomputer-assisted instruction only with the in-troduction of HyperCard two years ago. Hyper-Card, an authoring system for the Macintosh(it now comes packaged with each new Mac),allows easy creation of immediate links fromany point in a program to any other or to adifferent program altogether. (Hypertext is thegeneric name for the concept underlying this kindof information structure; HyperCard is Apple’sproduct.) Other commercially available hyper-media authoring systems are CourseBuilder forthe Macintosh (TeleRobotics∗), IconAuthor for theIBM and Apollo (Aimtech∗), and LinkWay (IBM).HyperCard is probably the most widely used systemon the market, and it is undoubtedly a very power-ful and attractive tool. This author knows of onlyone company (HyperGlot∗) publishing HyperCardmaterials for language learning, but the enthusi-asm seen in HyperCard user groups on campusesacross the country strongly suggests that muchmore material will follow.

EVALUATION

Intelligent evaluation of technology-based lan-guage materials is not easy for teachers who areunfamiliar with them. Two criteria are obvious:the first, which applies to any instructional mate-rials, is that the language context be correct, au-thentic, and appropriate. The second is that theprogram run as it should, without bugs, withoutcrashing. But only these two criteria are absolute.A package judged unacceptable by one teacherfor any of a number of reasons may adequately filla specific need for another. No reviewer, no matterhow expert or objective, can evaluate a packageand establish a rating which is equally valid forall potential users. Most teachers are hard put to“keep up with the literature” even with regard totheir own special research interests, whether inmethodology, in applied linguistics, or in literarystudies. A nearly Herculean effort is required tokeep abreast of the tidal wave of additional ma-terial being published on technology. Nonethe-less, those who have the responsibility for choos-ing or recommending instructional materials forpurchase should probably skim a large variety ofpublications, not limiting themselves to their ownlanguage journals.∗ It is increasingly common for

a software program to be published simultane-ously in versions for several languages; while ageneral review could turn up first in the publica-tions not focused on one language (Modern Lan-guage Journal, Foreign Language Annals), a softwareprogram might be reviewed first, for example, bya German teacher in Unterrichtspraxis, while theSpanish teacher to whom it could be equally use-ful might not find it reviewed in Hispania for sev-eral months. Sometimes a program published forESL teachers will include the capability to handleFL characters and accents and could therefore beuseful to FL teachers as well, but it may be re-viewed first (or only) in an ESL journal and thusnot come to the FL teachers’ attention. And ofcourse the decision whether or not to purchaseor even examine a program ought not to reston one review. (Those who have the responsibil-ity for making recommendations to a departmentor language teaching program have good reasonto insist that they be given some release time orassistance.)

Another reason to browse through a varietyof publications for software reviews is that theirtone or approach may vary widely. A review writ-ten for a teacher who is familiar with comput-ers, with programming, or with using software inteaching may be incomprehensible to one withlittle or no experience in these areas. Some re-views are little more than descriptions of the for-mat and content of a lesson and evaluate only bythe two absolute criteria mentioned above. Otherreviews are predicated on assumptions or valuejudgments which the reader may not share; ifa reviewer believes that verb drills are pedagog-ically reactionary, a verb drill program may be sonegatively reviewed that a teacher who believesthat such drills can be useful may not be ableto tell whether the one in question is suitable.Similarly, if a reviewer strongly pefers the Macin-tosh to IBM-type machines or vice versa, reviews ofprograms which run on one or the other may bebiased.

It was suggested earlier that software shouldwhenever possible be examined directly as wellas judged via reviews. Looking beyond those twoabsolute criteria for good software, how is an inex-perienced teacher to judge a package? First andforemost, the needs, abilities, expectations, andspecial characteristics of one’s own learners mustbe kept in mind. Will they enjoy music and soundeffects or find them tedious? Do they need tobe taken through material step-by-step or couldthey be allowed to decide their own orderingof activities? Are they highly motivated enoughto stick with the material for efficient learning,or are they likely to quit an activity without


completing it—and should that be discouraged bythe software? Should they be forced to type in thecorrect answer if it is shown them after severalincorrect attempts? In drill-and-practice software,is the “analysis” of students’ errors based on ade-quate understanding of the student’s task and thepossible misconceptions that would lead to error?Are the feedback messages similar in tone and de-gree of specificity to the teacher’s own approach,and will they be understood and perceived as help-ful by the students? Such evaluations can onlybe made by the teacher on the basis of acquain-tance with the particular students in the particularsituation.

Teachers often find it difficult to go througha lesson from the point of view of students; theytend to give the right answer each time and to lookfor the correctness of the language to the exclu-sion of other considerations. All software shouldbe tested as it will be used by an unmotivated,mischievous, or not very able student, to give awide variety of unexpected and wrong responsesat every turn. What happens if the student sim-ply cannot guess the correct answer—is there anyway to pass the item or to see the answer so it canbe typed in? What happens if the student doesn’tattempt to answer but presses Enter or the spacebar? (Some programs automatically show the cor-rect answer, and some students, on discoveringthis, go through the lesson without making anyeffort to respond.) Does an extra space acciden-tally typed into the response cause the answer tobe judged incorrect? How are inappropriate up-per and lower case letters handled, or missing orsuperfluous accents? Are correct variants of theanswer accepted?

Software Design. Computer lesson design is par-ticularly difficult for teachers to judge. In theearly days of CALL, lessons were produced byprogrammers with sometimes only a rudimen-tary knowledge of the target language and noparticular pedagogical expertise. Later, teach-ers who had learned to program, or teacherstogether with programmers, developed lessonswhich followed familiar exercise formats. But evenexperienced and pedagogically sophisticatedteachers, teamed with expert programmers, donot automatically produce well-designed lessons.Design features can undermine the effectivenessof the program in ways which need not be con-sidered in evaluating textbooks. Screen designis not only an aesthetic but also a pedagogicalmatter. For example, is the use of color, or ofdifferent typefaces, rational and consistent; doesit carry out some organizational or pedagogical

function? Is the screen so full of text that it ap-pears dense or heavy, making information harderto absorb? Is all the information students needto perform the task shown on the screen at alltimes (how to type accents or return to a menu,for example) and does the same information ap-pear at the same location on the screen through-out the lesson, so students know exactly whereto look for it? Do students know where they arein the lesson at every point, how to get at someother part if they need to, and how to get back towhere they are working? Will an accidental ran-dom keypress get them lost? Many of these detailsseem trivial, but the accumulation of enough mi-nor inconveniences can impede or even preventlearning.

TESTING

Computer testing can refer simply to the com-puterized administration of conventional tests(on material which may or may not have beenpracticed on the computer), where the computermay only collect the responses or may also judgethem and tally scores. Many commercial drillprograms include a “test” section in which thestudents are scored on previously drilled mate-rial. Anecdotal evidence from GALL-experiencedteachers suggests that giving computerized testsfor “real” grades is undesirable, because typo-graphical errors and unintended keypresses mayresult in lowered scores for less skilled or nervousstudents. More important, the psychological ad-vantages of using the computer as all-patient tutoror near-infinite resource in language learning ac-tivities may be seriously compromised if it is alsoused to evaluate work for grade assignment.

Computer-Adaptive Testing . Computer-adaptivetesting (CAT) depends uniquely on the com-puter’s ability to select items one at a time froma large item bank on the basis of a continuallyadapting diagnosis of the individual examinee’slevel of ability. Such a test is prepared by rank-ing hundreds of items by degree of difficulty. Thelevel of difficulty of the first item presented tothe student is established on the basis of out-side criteria such as course level. If the studentgets the first item right, a slightly more difficultitem is presented; if it is answered incorrectly, aslightly lower ranked item is selected. The com-puter keeps a running record of performance oneach level of difficulty and can very quickly arriveat a statistically well-motivated assessment of thestudent’s performance level. Much controversy

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exists over the appropriateness of CAT for a fieldas complex as language, but computer-adaptiveplacement tests have already been developed atBrigham Young University by Jerry Larson (Span-ish) and Frank Otto (ESL).

The concept of CAT is clearly analogous to thatunderlying the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview,in which the interviewer establishes a sense of thestudent’s general level of proficiency and then at-tempts to elicit responses at higher levels, con-stantly adjusting the difficulty of the next questionby the student’s overall performance. ACTFL iscurrently developing a computer-adaptive read-ing proficiency test as the logical sequence to theOral Proficiency Interview, and Robert Ariew (Ari-zona) and Patricia Dunkel (Pennsylvania State)have worked on computer-adaptive listening com-prehension tests. Such tests are not for everydayuse, but they have great potential for placementand various certification purposes.

AUTHORING

Many technologically inexperienced teachersbelieve that if they do not like the “closed” or“fixed” commercial software materials which canonly be used as they come off the shelf, theyhave no alternative but to program their own“from scratch,” something most teachers are un-derstandably loath and/or unable to do. Actu-ally, one could describe a five-part continuum ofthe degree of control or input possible to theteacher in “creating” a lesson (7). At one extremeare those fixed lessons, which allow no modifi-cations of any kind. Next on the continuum are“template” or “shell” lessons, which provide oneor more pre-programmed lesson formats whichcome with a certain amount of content material,but which also allow the teacher to edit or add tothat content, for example, to create new vocabu-lary lists which can be run by the program in thegiven drill format. At their simplest such packagesat least allow teachers to adapt lessons to theirown textbooks or their own students’ needs, andtherefore they can be a very useful first or sec-ond step in experimenting with computer use.But the actual operation of the lesson remainstotally fixed in these lessons; the teacher cannotchange, for example, the number of times the stu-dent is required to attempt an item, or the feed-back message, or whether the definite article mustbe included in the answer, or whether an acciden-tal space will cause a correct answer to be judgedas wrong.

In the central position on the continuum is theauthoring system, a program which allows non-

programmers to choose and assemble a variety offeatures to make a lesson look and run exactlyas they like and fill in the content they want aswell. All authoring systems vary in flexibility andease of use: the more structured and internallyspecified an authoring system is (i.e., the feweroptions it allows the teacher), the simpler it willmake lesson creation. Some authoring systems onthe market are principally intended for design-ers of industrial or business lessons; others, suchas Quest (Allen Communication∗), CourseBuilder,and HyperCard (mentioned above in the contextof hypertext) are designed for educators in allfields. Probably the best known of those designedspecifically for language lessons are Dasher for theApple II (Conduit∗), CALIS for the IBM (DukeUniversity), and MacLang (Gessler∗) and PrivateTutor (Stephen Clausing, Yale University) for theMacintosh; all of these are designed for relativelystraightforward exercise generation and are fairlyeasy to learn to use because they do not for themost part introduce new lesson design concepts.Still, teachers who have not learned to programor to evaluate software in their own teaching con-text may wish to experiment with fixed packagesor driver programs before attempting authoring.Once they have developed their own criteria anda sense of what kind of lesson they want studentsto engage with, they will have a better basis forchoosing the most appropriate authoring system.

At the next point on the continuum are au-thoring languages, which provide shortcuts forcommon programming operations, but the use ofan authoring language really requires a good un-derstanding of programming. Finally, basic pro-gramming uses a programming language such asBASIC, PASCAL, or C to specify every detail ofcontent, format, and operation.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Organizations and Journals (see Appendix for alist of the full names and addresses). The mostdirectly focused sources of information aboutthe use of technology in foreign language learn-ing and teaching are the organizations dedi-cated specifically to that use, CALICO and IALL(formerly NALLD, the National Association ofLanguage Laboratory Directors). Both of these or-ganizations publish journals and they both holdannual conferences where the presentations, theworkshops, and the exhibits all focus on the usesof technology in language education.

In addition, the conferences of all the regu-lar foreign language teachers’ organizations (the


AATs, ADFL, ACTFL, MLA, TESOL), both onthe national level and on the regional and statelevels, now regularly include technology-orientedpresentations, workshops, and exhibits, and thenewsletters and journals of these organizationsinclude frequent articles on technology use andreviews of software, as does The Modern LanguageJournal. The ERIC Clearinghouse on Languagesand Linguistics and the Center for Applied Lin-guistics maintain extensive data bases of relevantinformation available to teachers. The MLA nowhas a standing Advisory Committee on Computersand Emerging Technologies, which contributesitems of interest to the MLA Newsletter.

Several other organizations focus on the use oftechnology in more broadly defined areas of ed-ucation. The Association for Computers and theHumanities tends to focus more on the use of thecomputer as a tool by scholars in carrying out lit-erary and textual research than on its use in deliv-ering instruction, but its publications (especiallyComputers and the Humanities; Vol. 23, i, 1989, wasa special issue on Intelligent Computer-AssistedLanguage Instruction) and conferences are valu-able to the foreign language teacher whose teach-ing and/or research interests bridge the gapbetween language and literature. EDUCOM∗ (anational consortium of educational institutions,teachers, and technology manufacturers) is dedi-cated to the development of educational comput-ing in all disciplines; it holds national and regionalmeetings, conducts seminars, and together withNCRIPTAL∗ sponsors an annual competition forexcellent educational software and technology-based instructional programs. EDUCOM puts outa newsletter and numerous other reports and pub-lications; it has sponsored the publication of Com-puting across the Curriculum: Academic Perspectives(Academic Computing, 1989), which includes achapter on computing in FL education.

In addition to the journals which are con-cerned with language teaching generally, thosewhich address the teaching of one particular lan-guage, and those which explore the use of tech-nology for education, the countless publicationswhich focus on the technology for a wide vari-ety of other purposes, such as business, may alsocontain material of interest to foreign languageteachers.

State boards of education are increasinglyaware of teachers’ need for information and sup-port, although in many cases foreign languageteaching tends to be relatively low on their list ofpriorities. Illinois, for example, funds a networkof regional Educational Service Centers (ESCs),each of which provides information, workshops,

demonstration materials, etc., to the teachers inits geographical area. Even when the mandate ofsuch boards does not include foreign languages,their staff members are generally eager to be of asmuch use as possible and can often refer foreignlanguage teachers to other sources of informationand help. Even if no support structure yet existsin a given state, insistent requests from concernedteachers may prompt its creation.

Hardware manufacturers, too, are increasinglyconcerned with helping teachers realize the po-tential of technology; they know that without realintegration of computer use into the curriculum,which in turn depends on the availability of goodsoftware, the hardware will not sell to educators.In 1983 IBM developed a program called ACIS(Academic Information Systems) through whichit has funded materials development projects ininstructional computing in a wide variety of fieldsat nineteen campuses across the country. (Thesegrants, referred to by IBM as AEP [Advanced Ed-ucation Projects], had their own names at differ-ent campuses: the IBM projects at Princeton werecalled PEGASUS, at Cornell, EZRA, at Illinois,EXCEL, etc.) ACIS holds national and regionalconferences where faculty from these campusesdiscuss and demonstrate their projects and holdpanel discussions on issues of interest to specificsubject areas. Apple holds similar national and re-gional meetings for educators interested in theMacintosh. (Although foreign language teacherswho can afford to go to any conferences tend un-derstandably to use their funds for FL meetings,those interested in the potential of the technol-ogy will also find much of interest in these moregeneral gatherings. Educational innovations inother fields can suggest exciting and provoca-tive ways to rethink one’s own traditions andconventions.)

Some of the software developed by teachersin these grant programs can be acquired bythe public. WISC-WARE∗ is a consortium whichdistributes the research and instructional soft-ware developed at the nineteen AEP campuses.At WISC-WARE Demonstration Centers on manycampuses teachers can evaluate and order soft-ware. A listing of academic software for the Mac-intosh is available at Kinko’s quick copy centers,and software may be ordered there. Teachersshould keep in mind, however, that software of-fered through WISC-WARE and Kinko’s is onlycursorily refereed; some packages are excellent,others may represent old-fashioned pedagogicalprinciples or perhaps highly idiosyncratic ones,and some materials may still be at an early stageof development. Caveat emptor!

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In an effort to upgrade the standards of instruc-tional software and to raise the visibility and statusof software authors in their own disciplines, IBMhas supported the establishment of software eval-uation committees in several discipline-specificprofessional societies, including the Modern Lan-guage Association and the Center for Applied Lin-guistics. The MLA committee handles software forEnglish and foreign language, the one at CAL, forlinguistics and ESL. These committees adjudicatethe submission of faculty-developed software foruse either in teaching or in research which has notyet been published commercially. The committeemembers evaluate the software, much as refereesfor journals evaluate articles submitted for pub-lication, and like journal referees may make rec-ommendations’ to the author for revision or im-provement. Software judged to be exemplary andof interest to the profession is published throughTASL (The Academic Software Library), an IBMdistribution mechanism.

IBM has also instituted a Consulting Scholarsprogram, providing full travel costs for major fig-ures in educational computing to visit campusesall over the country to speak on the state of com-puting in their field and to discuss problems andpossibilities with interested faculty. Two of theseConsulting Scholars have come from foreign lan-guages: James Noblitt, Professor of French andLinguistics, who with his colleagues Donald Solaand Willem Pet developed Systeme D at Cornell,and Edna Coffin (Michigan), whose Hebrew in-teractive videodisk program A Safe Affair won aDistinguished Software Award in the 1989 NCRIP-TAL/EDUCOM competition. In September 1989IBM opened an Institute for Academic Technol-ogy which will undertake research on the develop-ment of educational and research software in for-eign languages and in math and science; Noblittis currently a Fellow there.

Books. The Appendix contains a list of bookswhich could be of use to the foreign languageteacher. The list is by no means exhaustive, andit is impossible to provide a detailed enough de-scription to allow readers to guess the usefulnessof one or author volume at their own level of ex-pertise; as with reviews of software, teachers willneed to browse and compare notes with more ex-perienced colleagues to find the most directly use-ful information.

Workshops and Teacher Training Programs. Thediscussion of teachers’ conferences above in-cluded mention of the technology-oriented work-shops they often include; these are usually only

three hours long, sometimes six, and are most of-ten at a basic or introductory level. Similar half-dayworkshops on CALL are frequently arranged forteacher inservice days and school district meet-ings. Such workshops may provide a general in-troduction to the basic idea of CALL, or they maydemonstrate software, or—if set up in a computerclassroom—they can give teachers an opportu-nity to try out many different software packages.As this paper should have made clear, however,teachers cannot hope to learn very much aboutCALL in so brief an exposure. Moreover, tech-nological beginners find it strenuous if not actu-ally anxiety producing to deal with technology,and the number of hours they can productivelyconcentrate on it is limited. And, sometimes, itmust be said, these workshops are given by teach-ers who have become so unreservedly enthusiasticabout the technology that their presentations aremore like sales pitches than objective and helpfuldiscussions.

Summer programs offer a more extended op-portunity for becoming familiar with technologyin FL education. CALICO∗ has for the last severalyears sponsored summer institutes, and the 1989Linguistics Society of America Summer Instituteat the University of Arizona included courses ontechnology; the University of Illinois’ CALLIOPEproject (Computer-Assisted Language Learningand Instruction Outreach Project in Education,1985–88) included two intensive summer insti-tutes in 1986 and 1987. NCRIPTAL∗ offered aworkshop on guidelines for software development(not specifically geared to foreign languages) insummer 1990. Teachers interested in workshopsshould request as much detail as possible in ad-vance. Workshop descriptions should make clearwhether they are designed to teach teachers onlyto evaluate and make use of technology-basedmaterials or actually to produce them and, ifthe latter, whether by teaching programming orby teaching authoring. Workshop sessions shouldideally be given not by computer scientists, noryet by humanities computing experts, but by lan-guage teachers who have technological expertisebut who can still approach the material from theperspective of the nontechnical teacher. Even forthose who do not want to get into programming,but only to make use of fully developed lessonsor to use authoring systems, some introductionto basic principles of programming and to thecomputer’s internal workings is important, and agood deal of practice in software evaluation is es-sential for all. For complete beginners a workshopthat proposes to teach the evaluation of softwareand techniques for its integration into FL teaching


should probably take two weeks of full-time com-mitment. Beginners learning to author materialseven with the simplest and friendliest authoringsystems will find themselves under extreme pres-sure in a program less than three weeks long.Those who want to learn programming for lan-guage lesson development should be prepared togive the effort at least six weeks of full-time con-centration as an introduction (and should prob-ably ask their spouse’s permission for at least ayear’s worth of total spare-time commitment!).

When inquiring about workshops teachersshould indicate their own level of computer expe-rience very clearly and ascertain that the level ofinstruction will be appropriate for them. Unfortu-nately, workshop hosts sometimes advertise theirprograms as being designed for the complete be-ginner but then accept all applicants for financialreasons, regardless of level of experience, and thiscreates difficulty for both teacher and student, un-less participants at different levels can be groupedseparately. Applicants themselves sometimes inad-vertently misrepresent their own degree of exper-tise. This author was once part of a team giving twoworkshops at a teachers’ conference; the morn-ing one was advertised as being for the completebeginner and the afternoon one as advanced, forthose with enough experience in CALL to addressseveral technologically sophisticated topics. Themorning session went well, but the workshop or-ganizers were horrified to discover that amongthe afternoon participants were a number of themorning’s novices, who had assumed that on thebasis of one three-hour workshop they were nowadvanced learners.

Regular academic year extension courses orsemester-long workshop series are probably thebest way for teachers to learn about the use of thetechnology. A once- or twice-a-week program al-lows teachers not only the time to absorb and workwith new concepts and techniques but also theopportunity to introduce such techniques gradu-ally for their own purposes into their own classes.In some school district’s language teachers haveset up informal working groups, meeting perhapsone evening per week or alternate Saturday morn-ings, to examine software and exchange ideas andtechniques, sometimes with the help of technolog-ically experienced staff from a nearby university.Universities for their part are becoming aware ofthe mutual advantages in working with secondaryschool teachers in this way. Funding sources, bothpublic and private, are often eager to support suchconsortial groups, and interested teachers shouldencourage their colleagues to join in exploringthe possibilities.

GENERAL ISSUES

One obstacle to getting involved with technol-ogy is the prevalent fear that the path into thetechnological jungle is steep and slippery and thatit is difficult to explore it without becoming en-trapped. Conservative teachers fear that the tech-nology will weaken or interfere with their controlof the class and are willing to consider only thosetechnology-based materials which perform elec-tronically the most traditional teaching tasks. Onthe other hand, the most enthusiastic convertssometimes get carried away by the sheer fascina-tion with the new capabilities and “computerize”activities whose pedagogical value is doubtful. Suc-cessful integration of technology will require newperspectives and new theory; we need to rethinkmany of the language activities we ask students toengage in before we bother to computerize them.

Whether the primary focus of technology-basedlanguage education should be the teacher andthe instructional process or the student and thelearning process—CALI (computer-assisted lan-guage instruction) or CALL (computer-assistedlanguage learning)—is not a quibble. The great-est part of present FL software material is de-voted to grammar and vocabulary lessons, the un-derlying assumption of which is the notion thatlanguage is a set of facts, information, or habitsin which learners must receive instruction, overwhich they must demonstrate mastery. All theearly software was conceived of as assisting teach-ers, freeing them from the tedious mechanicaltasks that grammar and vocabulary are still widelythought to be. Language acquisition theory ofthe past fifteen years has persuasively suggestedother perspectives. Language is now more oftenseen as a dynamic interactive system for convey-ing meaning, and language learning is the acqui-sition of the ability to construct communicativemeaning in a new system. Since so complex anability can hardly be “taught,” our job is to createan environment—in class or in our materials—inwhich students can work on acquiring that ability,and we are increasingly aware how differendy stu-dents undertake the process of acquisition. In thistheoretical climate CALL (in contrast to CAI) isflowering.

But to reject all drill-and-practice materialswould be to overreact. Language learning alwaysentails some habit formation, for which computerdrills can be ideal. However, there are significantdifferences between good drills and bad drills;the best ones on the computer (those which ac-cept several correct answers and give specific feed-back messages, for example) are probably better

Nina Garrett 715

for individualized learning than any classroomdrill can be. More important the individual stu-dent’s own hypotheses about how the new lan-guage encodes meaning have to be actively testedin somewhat controlled discourse situations—i.e.,lessons—which can suggest why a certain utter-ance doesn’t come across as meaning just whatthe student intended—i.e., can do highly individ-ualized and context-sensitive error analysis andinterpretation. (See Research, below.)

Individualization has always been touted as oneof the major advantages of GAI, but until veryrecently the goal of individualization has been re-alized only in the inherently “self-pacing” natureof most computer lessons (except for timed ac-tivities like games). Students can move throughthe material at their own pace and can repeator sometimes skip segments of lessons accord-ing to their perception of their own need, butthe material contained in the lesson, the way itis presented, the analysis of the students’ per-formance, is the same for all. Recent researchon specific differences in the way learners ap-proach learning tasks strongly suggests that trueindividualization of CALL materials should pro-vide alternative approaches or presentations forstudents who tend to have—for example—a field-dependent or a field-independent cognitive style,or provide different scoring strategies for thosewho tend to be impulsive or cautious, to men-tion only two possible differences out of manywhich shape learners’ interaction with materials.One kind of hint or feedback message will be use-ful or congenial to some learners but altogetherunhelpful to another. Experienced and sensitiveteachers have intuitions about their individual stu-dents’ problems, strategies, motivation, and per-sonal style, but they have only limited time andcannot provide explanations from numerous dif-ferent perspectives or individually tailored feed-back for every student. Sophisticated programsshould eventually allow students to choose froma variety of approaches, though to choose appro-priately they themselves will have to learn to un-derstand their own learning styles and strategies.

The shift to an idea of CALL that stressesindividual learner characteristics and the learner-centeredness of the learning process does not nec-essarily point to just those uses of the technologythat give the learner direct access to authentic lan-guage, in text, audio, or video. In fact, those usersraise a whole new set of extremely interestingquestions. The assumption underlying much ofthe current enthusiasm for interactive video andfor hypertext, that authentic data will give learnersthe best sense of the new language and culture, is

reexamined by Nostrand (9), who warns that with-out guidance students are apt to interpret authen-tic materials in terms of their own stereotypes andprejudices; he speaks largely of text, but the sameis true for video. Should students only engage with“natural” authentic language? Or should they (in-stead, or also, or first) engage with language whichhas been pre-digested, organized by pedagogicalor linguistic principles? Shouldn’t that questionbe broken down, posed instead as: for what kind oflearners, or at what level of learning, or for whichNL-target language relationship, would pedagogi-cally organized material be more helpful than rawdata, or vice versa?

The rush of enthusiasm for HyperCard and forother hypertext and hypermedia programs shouldgive us ample opportunity to explore questionsbased on cognitive and educational psychology.So far that enthusiasm has largely been generatedby teachers and scholars who can see very clearlyhow they would use such complex materials orhow they would like their students to use them.But will students use them in those ways? If learn-ers have access to a lot of data regarding some-thing they need to know an unspecified amountabout—reference materials, or related bodies ofmore or less directly relevant information, farmore than can realistically be accessed—what dothey in fact look up? Do they know what they needto look for? How do they make use of it? In thelong run do they perhaps learn as much frombrowsing, in what might seem to us an inefficientor purposeless way, as from directed exploration?How freely does what kind of student at what levelof learning browse and explore? Do learners getlost moving around in an infinitely complex set ofrelated data? What kind of student gets lost underwhat circumstances? What kind of lesson structureor visual clues tend to prevent their getting lost?

We need to rethink some poorly motivatedmethodological mandates against correcting er-rors. For which learners, at what level, for whatpurpose, can error analysis be most helpful? Whatkind of error analysis? What kind of deliberateshaping of the environment will have lasting ben-eficial influence on the smoothness of the learn-ing, the efficiency and accuracy of an individuallearner’s hypothesis-testing? How do we establishthe criteria?

RESEARCH

Obviously, a great deal of research is needed,not only on carefully defined questions of ped-agogical efficacy, but also on details of thelearning experience and the nature of learners’


idiosyncratic language processing. The power oftechnology as a medium for supporting new kindsof language learning activities is multiplied byits potential for an unprecedented integrationof research and teaching. A CALL lesson whichcreates an environment for some interesting lan-guage learning activity could be fitted with a pro-gram collecting data on how the learner makesuse of that environment, and those data can notonly feed directly back into improving pedagogybut can also contribute to the development ofsecond language acquisition theory. In princi-ple, of course, teachers can always collect dataon their students’ learning, but the exceptionallyheavy teaching loads carried by most FL teach-ers strongly militate against their doing so. Thetime and thought required to design significantresearch will be the same regardless of researchmethodology, but once a task has been createdon the computer it can not only collect but alsoperform analyses on a far larger number of stu-dents and far more complex data than any teachercould possibly handle otherwise. Unfortunately,ordinary scores collected on the use of most soft-ware lessons are likely to be totally unrevealing:the fact that a student gets a score of eighty per-cent on most conventional grammar or vocabu-lary or reading comprehension tests tells us noth-ing about the mental representation of the targetlanguage or what can be communicated with it,but that is, in fact, true of scores on most non-computer-based tests, too.

Furthermore, the computer can enable re-search we cannot undertake any other way, be-cause it can collect data on the learner’s processof dealing with language, rather than only on theproduct, the final sentence or total score on a setof items. For example, a pilot research projectat Cornell has attached a tracking program toSysteme D so that individual students’ every key-press is recorded—what they write, what they lookup at what point in the composing, what use theymake of what they look up in the next words orphrases written, for what kind of assignment, etc.(8). Independent measures of student character-istics can also be collected—level of study, apti-tude, and cognitive style—so that the data supportreal insights into how learners think when theygo about writing in a foreign language. Similarprojects can easily be imagined to investigate howlearners develop reading or listening comprehen-sion or cultural understanding or how they makeuse of hypertext or hypermedia to build their ownnotions of meaning in the target language.

In more complex computer-based projects thecomputer can not only track what the learner does

in the learning environment but also interact withit; lessons should be designed to respond or pro-vide feedback of some kind to learners’ input andto collect data on how they make use of that feed-back. For example, in a grammar activity requir-ing students not just to select the correct formfrom a paradigm but rather to express a certainmeaning, correction attempts after feedback canbe extraordinarily revealing of students’ own id-iosyncratic hypotheses about what a given struc-ture really means or how structure and vocabu-lary, interact in expressing meaning of all kinds—socio-linguistic, pragmatic, and discourse mean-ing as well as semantic.

Technology-based classroom research thus canbe of direct use in shaping our pedagogy (bothmaterials design and the classroom approachesinto which material use is integrated) and at thesame time can contribute significantly to a grow-ing body of second language acquisition theory.Both efforts are crucially important; the ability tocombine them in technology-based projects rep-resents a major new opportunity for teachers. Asyet very few projects along these lines are beingundertaken, because no commercial software al-lows the collection of data beyond raw scores,so that interested researchers must develop theirown instruments, but the potential is graduallycoming to be recognized.4

PROFESSIONAL REWARDS

Teachers who devote the time and energy nec-essary to create technology-based materials fortheir teaching are understandably frustrated bythe continuing reluctance of most departments,at least in research universities, to recognize miswork with promotion and tenure. Unfortunately,it is difficult for chairs and promotion commit-tees, who are seldom involved in such develop-ment efforts themselves, to distinguish betweenconventional materials being delivered electron-ically and genuinely innovative materials whosedevelopment is based on some theoretically orpedagogically sophisticated rethinking of FL ed-ucation. The MLA committee mentioned aboveis concerned about this issue and is interested inworking with faculty and department heads to de-velop guidelines and perhaps a list of names ofrecognized experts to act as referees. One wayof resolving the issue, however, is to make the de-velopment of technology-based learning materialsan integral part of a research project, as suggestedabove, since publication of papers on the researchwill make an unarguable contribution to the

Nina Garrett 717

promotion bid even when the materials develop-ment effort per se does not.

CONCLUSION

This paper has surveyed the ways in which com-puters, audio, and video are already being usedboth to assist FL teaching and to create com-plex and supportive environments for languagelearning and has also sketched out some new ap-proaches to technology-based materials develop-ment which are beginning to be implementedor already envisioned in software assisting thelearning of grammar, vocabulary, reading, listen-ing, writing, and culture. It has suggested thattechnology can play a major role in foreign lan-guage learning and in research on that learn-ing. However, the development of the potentialof technology-based materials is still in its earlystages, where software lessons tend to follow fa-miliar designs for conventional purposes ratherthan exploiting new capabilities for implement-ing and testing theoretical principles of classroomlanguage acquisition for learners’ benefit. Issueson which the realization of that potential dependswere also explored here: the shift from thinkingof technology as assisting instruction to thinkingof it as supporting learning; the problems attend-ing the evaluation of technology’s efficacy; theprerequisites to genuine individualization of soft-ware; the advantages and disadvantages of ped-agogically shaped as contrasted with authenticmaterials and of learner control over the learn-ing environment. All of these issues are relatedin complex ways to the perspectives brought tobear on foreign language education by theoreti-cal considerations in second language acquisition,but they have to be addressed in the actual peda-gogical situation, as they affect our learners in theclassroom and the language media center.

The most important potential of the technol-ogy is for integration. We are concerned about thetendency in language education to see the teach-ing of language and culture as separate, even ifcomplementary, but with video we can presentlanguage in its cultural context. Language andliterature are often separated in our curricula,and learners often experience a difficult transi-tion from reading pedagogical prose to readingauthentic texts and from hearing pedagogical au-dio to understanding natural spoken language:the computer and interactive technologies will al-low teachers to select materials of all kinds, sup-port them as learners’ needs dictate, and use thevisual options’ of screen presentation or the in-teractive capabilities of computer control to help

students develop good reading or listening tech-niques. For many language teachers research andteaching are two separate activities; literary schol-arship often has little connection with languageteaching, methodological research may not be val-ued, and teaching loads may prevent the under-taking of either. Using technology-based materialsto collect data on the learning process may well de-velop into one of the most interesting options forboth pedagogically and theoretically motivatedresearch.

As the classic joke format has it, there’s goodnews and bad news. The good news is that thetechnology does offer the potential for enormousenhancement of foreign language learning. Thebad news is that that potential cannot be easily re-alized. It is not just a matter of spending money, ofconsulting the experts, and most certainly is not amatter of waiting for more sophisticated machin-ery or programming techniques. With or withoutbudgetary or logistical constraints, there simply isno such thing as an ideal configuration of hard-ware or an ideal set of software for language learn-ers in general, and there probably never will be.Deciding what is best in any particular situationwill always require a teacher’s considered analy-sis of that situation and detailed information onthe currendy available options. But while we dealwith the realities of foreign language education to-day, it is not visionary, but common sense, to con-sider how we would like to see the field developingin the next decade. Some of our most importantpriorities—focus on the individual learner, a trueintegration of the teaching of language and theteaching of cultural understanding and literature(not just a smooth articulation between them),bridging the gap between theory and classroompractice—can be strongly supported by intelligentuses of technology. But these will not be accom-plished unless and until teachers themselves takethe initiative to think through what the technol-ogy should be able to do for them and for theirstudents and make their needs known.

NOTES

1 I am indebted to the Director of the LanguageLearning Laboratory of the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign, C. C. Cheng, its Associate Direc-tor, Robert S. Hart, and members of its staff (JunettaGillespie, Rachel Manwell, Ulric Chung, and RickTreece) for their help in preparing this paper. I amalso grateful to others who supplied information andreferences: Robby Ariew, Patricia Dandonoli, PatriciaDunkel, Glyn Holmes, Jerry Larson, Ronald McCrary,James Noblitt, Sue Otto, Sharon Scinicariello, and someanonymous reviewers. Any oversights or mistakes are myresponsibility. I regret that it was impossible to mentionall the interesting work that is being done in this field


around the country; dozens of other people and pro-grams might well have been included.

2 Personal communication from Seth Levin, Editor,Gessler Software.

3 In the following sections general reference is madeto various kinds of software, in most cases without spec-ifying any particular package. Apologies are made tothe teacher who finds this frustrating, but software pub-lication changes so rapidly (new packages are broughtout, earlier ones reissued for other hardware, outmodedones dropped from catalogues) that any set of refer-ences compiled at this writing would be out of date be-fore this issue appeared. Moreover, any given programmay be available in one language or several, for one ma-chine or several, so that more specific references mightstill frustrate most readers. The interested teacher isstrongly urged to write to publishers (addresses listed inthe Appendix), to read a variety of journals which pub-lish reviews (also listed in the Appendix), and, most ofall, to attend at least one of the major language teachingconferences and spend significant time in the exhibitarea.

4 The author would be very much interested in hear-ing from teachers who have done computer-based re-search along the lines suggested here or who have ideasfor such projects.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (for this paper; for generalreferences, see Appendix online)

1. Avner, Allen, Carolynn Moore & Stanley Smith.“Active External Control: A Basis for Superior-ity of CBI.” Journal of Computer-Based Instruction6 (1980): 115–18.

2. Clark, Richard E. “Confounding in Educational Com-puting Research.” Journal of Educational Comput-ing Research 1 (1985): 137–48.

3. Cronbach, Lee J. & Karen Shapiro. Designing Evalua-tions of Educational and Social Programs. San Fran-cisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982.

4. Cronbach, Lee J., Sueann Robinson Ambron, San-ford M. Dornbusch, Robert D. Hess, Robert C.Hornik, D. C. Phillips, Decker F. Walker & StephenS. Weiner. Toward Reform of Program Evaluation.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980.

5. Fraser, Barry J. “Directions in Curriculum Evalua-tion.” Studies in Educational Evaluation 10 (1984):125–34.

6. Hagler, Paul & James Knowlton. “Invalid Implicit As-sumptions in CBI Comparison Research.” Journalof Computer-Based Instruction 14 (1987): 84–88.

7. Holmes, Glyn. “Creating CAL Courseware.” System 11(1983): 11–23.

8. Noblitt, James S. “Tracking the Learner.” Foreign Lan-guage Acquisition Research and the Classroom. Ed.Barbara F. Freed. Lexington, MA: Heath, forth-coming.

9. Nostrand, Howard L. “Authentic Texts and CulturalAuthenticity.” Modem Language Journal 73 (1989):49–52.

10. Parlett, Malcolm Richard & David Hamilton. “Eval-uation as Illumination: A New Approach to theStudy of Innovatory Programs.” Curriculum Eval-uation Today: Trends and Implications. Ed. DavidTawney. London: Macmillan, 1976.

11. Pederson, Kathleen M. “Review of Allons-Y.” ForeignLanguage Annals 19 (1986): 61–64.

12. Pusack, James & Sue E. K. Otto. “Blueprint for aComprehensive Foreign Language Curriculum.”Computers and the Humanities 18 (1984): 195–204.

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Technology in the Service of Language Learning: Trends and...

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