Final CALL thoughts

CALL tools are only as good as the task or focus of the activity that employs them. In the right situation, I think CALL tools can be useful tools that allow students to use English in new environments or ways. When not used in a focused and controlled way, however, they can become distracting or lead to little language practice or production. To illustrate both the good and the bad of using CALL tools, let’s examine a tool like Second Life. I could see Second Life being very useful in an EFL environment for students who would like to speak to native speakers of English. However, a teacher would have to give students very specific parameters for the students that would lead to language production. For example, perhaps the teacher could set up an “appointment” with another teacher for each class to go online Second Life and do an “intercambio” where they speak English half of the time and Spanish half of the time and need to get specific information from each other. Without some sort of guided exercise like this, though, CALL tools can become simply toys that offer little pedagogical or learning value. Again, they can offer new ways of interacting and new opportunities for interaction or they can lead to aimless “wandering” if there is no central, organizing task.


I also think that CALL can be a useful tool in helping students collaborate and provided feedback for each other with writing assignments. Google Docs is a fantastic tool in that it allows people to share, review, and revise a document with other classmates in a way that is both intuitive and simple. I personally prefer it to something like Wikispaces though I also feel that with enough training and for the right task, Wikispaces could also be a good way to collaborate on something. One of the features that Wikispaces has that Google Docs doesn't is the ability to have an asynchronous discussion with other teammates about the document they are working on. It also allows for the students to revert to earlier forms of the document if they deem a revision incorrect or (perhaps) inappropriate. Of course, perhaps the best tool for providing actual feedback in writing is simple Microsoft Word. By using Track Changes or Insert Comment, you can either edit the document or provide feedback without changing the text which is very helpful in the revision process.

One thing that I would like to learn more about in regards to CALL is how it fits in to distance learning. I think tools such as Blackboard, chat, or even Second Life could all fit into the curriculum of a distance language school, but I would be interested to find out more about how they manage the dispersal of information since there isn't a central meeting place for a lecture or seminar discussion to take place. Additionally, I would like to learn how they manage documents and feedback. Is it through one of the tools I've mentioned above? Is there another, more effective tool that is still lurking out there for me to discover? These are questions for future exploration within the field as I feel that distance learning could become more and more relevant to language learning.