In an era in which universities are being encouraged to see the need for strategy development in general, and information systems strategy development in particular, this paper explores some of the influences upon decision-making about information technology in UK university Modern Language departments. Findings from a series of interviews with Modern Language department heads and departmental computing representatives are discussed.

Since the principal objectives of the CTI Centre for Modem Languages (CTICML) and of the other CTI Centres are to increase awareness of the potential of computers and other forms of IT in teaching and learning and to stimulate their actual use, it seemed a reasonable first step after the establishment of the CTICML in April 1989 to try to establish the current range of attitudes and practices in the field of lan- guages in higher education in the United Kingdom. We considered that this would both help us to gain a view of what had to be done and give us one yard- stick against which to measure the effect which our activities over the next few years will have had.

The CALICO Journal serves as the chief means of information distribution for the Computer Assisted Language Learning & Instruction Consortium and is published quarterly. The following extract is reprinted from CALICO Journal, December 1989, with the land permission of the editor. Although the information gathered is not always directly comparable with that in our own survey, it does provide an interesting view of computers and language learning in the USA.

This paper sets CD-ROM technology in the context of the new language learning pedagogy based on the communicative approach. It establishes a typology of language-related CD-ROM products, suggests ways of exploiting characteristic CD-ROM facilities and identifies fruitful new areas of development. It also looks at the logistics of CD-ROM use in an academic environment.

In any language-teaching institution the teaching staff can legitimately be seen as consumers of the various teaching aids which are commercially available, ranging from the staple diet of books, set texts, secondary reading, to video material, slides, computer software, etc. Another way of interpreting the principle of consumership is that the students are the ultimate beneficiaries of the materials we use in our teaching. The extent to which our students benefit from our teaching is largely dependent on the materials that we have at our disposal. ‘Bad materials = bad teaching’ is a rather simplistic way of looking at this issue, but one which has a lot to commend itself in my view. Would we change our teaching methods if our students made constructive criticism? In a recent temporary teaching post I held as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, I was struck by the importance given across the board in the USA to official student surveys carried out by the college administration based on the professors' performance, the results of which can be crucial in the securement of tenure. The attitude in the UK (at least in the universities) is totally at odds with this particular sense of consumership, and one can imagine the degree of resistance that a plan to introduce a similar system of student assessment of lecturers might meet in this country, most obviously because students are not consumers in this country in quite the same sense that they are in the USA. Although the student assessment system itself clearly has its pitfalls there are some positive things to be gained from surveys of this kind, in that they can be very informative about student response to courses, teaching methods, etc., and can lead the way to improved teacher-student relations.

The history of computer-aided language learning (CALL) dates back some 40 years. During this period two main types of system have been developed: frame-based and intelligent. These two types of programs are examined in turn below.

When Professor Jonathan Wilkenfeld presented ICONS to a group of staff and students from Karlsruhe College in Spring 1989 and subsequently let us in as “observers” of the ongoing simulation, we hardly suspected what a radically new kind of learning experience awaited us in an ordinary language class when we participated “for real” in Autumn 1989.