The May issue of ReCALL last year opened with the sentence, “Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has reached a stage of maturity where it is no longer necessary to try to prove that it is ‘better’ than traditional teaching”. John Gillespie comes to a similar conclusion based on a survey of research articles in three major CALL journals (including, of course, ReCALL) over an 11-year period. The aim is to identify strengths and weaknesses in methodology, as well as topics that are on the rise or falling out of favour, extensively investigated or seriously understudied. It is as well to remember that science is a human endeavour, and that research is subject to trends and local constraints such that many studies are small, one-off and relatively local affairs based on the teacher-researcher’s observations, and may thus lack ambition. As other surveys, editorials and books have mooted in the past, there are grounds for encouraging a broader, longer-term perspective with collaborative studies that are prompted by our knowledge (or lack of it) in a particular area rather than just by immediate teaching and learning concerns – in other words, in conceiving a collective research agenda for the field. What do we really want to explore in CALL?
Early use of computing in language teaching for automating selection, presentation and question formats were somewhat disappointing. Maria Chinkina, Simón Ruiz and Detmar Meurers revisit that untapped potential, as demonstrated via crowdsourced human judgements. Computer-generated questions were comparable to those produced by teachers in terms of well-formedness and answerability; further, participants guessed that 74% of teacher-written and 67% of computer-written questions were produced by humans. Language learning is not just about learning language, but is multidimensional and includes, among other things, intercultural communicative competence, the focus of the study by Babürhan Üzüm, Sedat Akayoglu and Bedrettin Yazan. The tools and tasks adopted over six weeks for trainee teachers in Turkey and the USA were indeed found to lead to curiosity and greater awareness of cultural diversity, which are likely to be of benefit for any intercultural interaction.
The tremendous potential of everyday mobile technologies for CALL are explored in the paper by Alberto Andujar in a relatively large-scale, longitudinal, ecological study. Feedback, varying from implicit to explicit, was provided by WhatsApp for grammar and vocabulary in writing. The experimental group made significantly better progress, but the study goes beyond this to look at dynamic assessment at four points in time, including the number and type of feedback prompts. Though the system was no doubt quite complex to set up, the groundwork has been laid for others to use similar approaches quite easily and quickly. In another example of appropriating everyday tools, Google Images was used to help elementary school learners generate labels automatically for photos that they took of shopping items, to which they could add their own notes, all on tablets. The experimental group in this study by Rustam Shadiev, Ting-Ting Wu and Yueh-Min Huang significantly outperformed the control, and the system was positively received on the whole.
To conclude with another truism: no single approach or method can be suitable for all learners at all times for all purposes, and CALL offers one way to tailor resources to individuals. In the case of video captions, Emily Fen Kam, Yeu-Ting Liu and Wen-Ta Tseng examined the effects on visual/auditory styles and working memory capacity and found some intriguing interactions between them and with the type of captions; this will have consequences for future development in this area.
