Description
The CALL as an approach supports the use of computers as “an aid to the presentation, reinforcement and assessment of material to be learned, usually including a substantial interactive element” (Davies, 2000, p. 90) at educational establishments as well as at home where learners can access these easily (Kenning, 1990, p. 67). This approach has gone through different stages of development. Warschauer and Healey (1998) define three stages; the first one is the behaviouristic CALL, the second one is the communicative CALL, and the third one is the integrative CALL. Each stage reflects technological advancements of that era and certain pedagogical approaches. All three stages are respectively described here below.The behaviouristic CALL (1950-1970) featured repetitive language drills. It was informed by the behaviourist learning model of stimulus-response and mostly popular in the USA. It was the era of first personal computers, which allowed students to work at an individual place. The second stage was the communicative CALL (1970-1980), which emerged due to greater possibilities for individual work using more advanced personal computers and the target language use throughout the learning process. In this period, text reconstruction programs and simulations were the most popular among learners because they could work either in pairs or groups, which stimulated discussion and discovery (Warschauer and Healey, 1998, p. 57). The third stage was the integrative CALL (1980-1998). It included task-based, content-based and project-based approaches that seek both to integrate various language skills, such as listening, speaking, writing and reading, and new technological tools more fully into the language learning process. Thus, “the multimedia networked computer is the technology of integrative CALL” (Warschauer and Healey, 1998, p. 58).
By looking at the three stages of CALL development, this article proposes a new, fourth stage of CALL development - the intelligent CALL, or ICALL (2000- to present). Current literature informs that at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, there was and still is an interest in including artificial intelligence technologies into language learning (Gamper and Knapp, 2002, p.329) and development of language learning materials and applications, e.g., creating intelligent tutoring systems “which are capable of processing and giving feedback on free language input” (Finkbeiner and Knierim, 2008, p. 402). According to (Schwienhorst, 2008, p. 140), ICALL includes intelligent tutoring systems that not only analyse utterances and give feedback to learners in an online mode, but also offline. The system uses automated feedback and stores data to form a learner corpus, which is further used to create and revise learner modes. By definition, such systems need to have three types of intelligence: (1) the subject matter, or domain, must be known to the computer system well enough to be able to solve problems in the domain; (2) the system must be able to find out and detect the learner’s approximation to that knowledge; and (3) the system must be ‘intelligent’ enough to implement strategies and pedagogies to reduce the difference between expert and student performance (Burns and Capps, 1988, p.1).
| Period | 23 Aug 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | EUROCALL 2018: Future proof of CALL: Language learning as exploration and encounters |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Jyväskylä, FinlandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |