The Impact of the Web on CALL

The use of Web for language teaching is relatively recent, with the first materials appearing in the early 90s. The impact, however, has been considerable, mainly because the technology has advantages over the previous generation of CALL by being cheaper and easier to develop and often cheaper and easier to run, and by offering real possibilities for authentic interaction.

Advantages include the ease of development across platforms, and the provision of free software such as Hot Potatoes Half-Baked Software and applets, helper applications and plug-ins. All this makes in-house developments without excessive reliance on expert help easier than ever before.

However, as with all IT solution, Web delivery is not without problems: (1) access to the Web is still often unreliable and slow, especially from modem access; (2) oral production skills cannot yet be supported meaningfully; (3) some students dislike/resist working with the Web (or any IT); (4) some students find the experience isolating; and (5) Web technology is still not well suited to delivery of sound and video. While much of this can be addressed, problems such as time commitment, financial return on investments and administrative concerns continue to exist as in CALL in general.

Despite all this, the biggest advantage is perhaps that Web technology offers the possibility of tailoring an impressive and useful resource by speedily linking to existing sites without requiring much technical expertise, and by adding course specific activities through Webquests and chats or bulletin boards.

Where sound is concerned, early WAV was cumbersome but Real Audio is now prevalent. By contrast, streamed video is still very rare, and will remain so until the diffusion of much greater bandwidth. German for Beginners  includes examples of film clips while Italia 2000 remains one of the very few sites using extensive video.

We are also now seeing some experimentation with voice recording through the use of customised software that can be downloaded by the user in a site like Global English.

The most recent development is the adoption of WebCT as a course template in sites like Internet Based Chinese Teaching and Learning. Advantages for practitioners include tracking students’ work, the ease with which synchronous and asynchronous communication facilities can be set up, and the user-friendly navigation structures provided.

This overview cannot be comprehensive but only representative of trends (see Felix 98 for a more extended list of sites). Where possible, early and late examples are given to demonstrate the improvement made possible by rapidly emerging software. The problem is finding early examples: active sites change with the technology and rapidly leave behind their more primitive first forms. The following is a broadly categorised overview of how the Web is currently being used for CALL.

The earliest materials took the form of textbooks on the Web, grammar exercises, and large and ever growing collections of materials, often without much structure to guide the uninitiated user. They have all undergone continuous change. Examples are the Bucknell Russian Program; The German Electronic Textbook and German for Beginners.

These tend to be fee-paying stand-alone courses that are password protected, offering free trial materials open to anyone. They range from one person operations like Cyberitalian and Interdeutsch  to large organisations like GlobalEnglish that employ considerable staff and offer a 24 hour attended chat site and other extensive services.

Grammar exercises

There is a multiplicity of grammar exercises on the Web, most of them using fill-ins, usually but not always in the context of a whole sentence, or multiple choice questions. Some are an integral part of a structured course. Occasionally, this is a Web-based course, with exercises linked to pages that explain the structures. More often the exercises supplement an off-line course, and may be linked directly to specific textbooks.

Grammar exercises are also available in more or less unstructured heaps with the user left to pick out the bits that will be helpful without much in the way of guidance. The grammar exercises offered in First year french@ut austin and Spanish 506 at Texas  are by contrast sorted into structured sets which can be worked through sequentially. Further, all follow the same pattern, so the student has to learn only one set of conventions to navigate around the site. French Grammar Central, on the other hand  draws on a variety of sites (nearly 400 claimed) with a variety of approaches from across the Web, and sorts the material only roughly into 12 very general categories like Adjectives, Articles and Determiners. Some sites such as Interdeutsch  make a real attempt at teaching grammar in a communicative approach.

Quizzes, games, templates

There is a large variety of ready-made templates for the creation of quizzes and games to choose from. The most user-friendly and extensive Quia is an excellent source both for developers and for users. It offers templates allowing games and quizzes to be created very quickly in several languages. Students can then access the material and the site will keep global statistics on performance. It also houses thousands of activities that are freely available. An indication of the size of the collection is that it claims to include nearly 600 activities for languages as at 12 April 2000.

Similarly Hot Potatoes offers six applications for the creation of interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the Web.

This has been one of the most rapidly developing areas in Web teaching. Activities have shifted from early task-based activities like Deutsche Internet Übungen in which students were given a task to carry out which involved them accessing relevant Web sites and compiling information on a specific topic  to elaborate experiential quests like Dream Holiday in which all activities are embedded online. A good introduction to the latest developments is A WebQuest about WebQuests .

This is another of the fastest growing areas with publishers like Heinle & Heinle and Prentice Hall among others providing a large variety of supplementary materials geared to their textbooks. Web activities range from simple on screen pro-formas for printing out (in more recent developments for emailing to the tutor) as in Adesso to online animated problem-solving activities created with Macromedia Flash as in Spywatch.The latter is one of the best examples to date of using animation (rather than video) to great effect.

Collections of resources have perhaps been the fastest growing area on the Web, with virtually every site including collections of links either for single languages or for multiple ones. As a result, enormous duplication is being generated. If there is a problem here, it is that it is fatally easy to build up comprehensive collections but difficult and time-consuming to create select collections that are well-structured and well-indexed.

Comprehensive collections include the Human Languages Pages (over 100 languages and over 1800 links) and the Language Hub: Worldwide resources for Languages (164 languages). Naturally, the larger the collection, the less user-friendly it becomes, and well structured single language sites can often be more helpful to users with limited time on their hands. See, for French, the pioneering Tennessee Bob’s Famous French Links, or ClicNet.

Virtual Connections

Connecting students to authentic environments is getting easier and more user-friendly with threaded discussion groups becoming very popular. Early Chats, Mushes and Moos tended to be very daunting text-based environments but some pioneers got good results nevertheless (see Warschauer 1995, 1996). Strictly speaking, these developments used the Internet and predate the Web by a decade. Still, the boundary between the Web and the Internet is increasingly blurred, and, in any case, Websites routinely include Chat and e-mail in what they offer.

The environment has since progressed tremendously with students being able to create their own three-dimensional characters through which to communicate as in Active Worlds. There are also now examples of entire collaborative courses run in several locations via Active Worlds Educational Solutions, a site for Japanese is currently under construction.

Professional development

These sites exist for various professional purposes - dissemination of information, exchanges of ideas and discussions as in WELL, training as in ICT4LT the provision of technical information as in Language Interactive, and enrichment as in LOTELinx.

Co-operative ventures

The Web lends itself perfectly to co-operative and collaborative activities between students at the same or different institutions, often with the final goal of publishing the work online. One excellent example is the Project-driven Foreign Language Learning  which integrates multimedia tools into project-driven language learning and in which students share the outcomes of their work with worldwide audiences by publishing on the Web.

Technology, ideas and implementations are changing too rapidly for it yet to be possible to provide a definitive picture of CALL on the Web.

Excellent things are being done, especially through synchronous and asynchronous forums like discussion groups, bulletin boards, Chats and MOOs. The Web already provides excellent examples of ways to motivate students and keep them interested in the work. Individual practitioners are using different combinations of approaches in a variety of ways. Included among these are hybrid approaches (designed to avoid potential problems) such as downloading activities from the Web on to a self-contained Intranet, integrating CD-ROMs and the Web, and running audio or video conferencing with Web activities.

Pedagogical approaches adopted online vary greatly from traditional grammar-based teaching to innovative goal-oriented quests with the former still dominating. However, it is difficult to determine the overall teaching approach since what is freely accessible on the Web is often only part of a larger package that also invariably includes face-to-face teaching. Nevertheless, while the Web is providing an increasingly rich shared free resource to CALL practitioners, the often alluded to 'radical rethinking' of the teaching approach still has a long way to go. The goal remains to use the Web for meaningful, realistic activities, to rethink the teaching approach, and to exploit the various communication resources available in the most motivating way possible.

Felix, U. (1998). Virtual Language Learning: Finding the Gems Amongst the Pebbles, Melbourne: Language Australia.

Warschauer, M. (1995). Virtual Connections: Online Activities and projects for Networking Language Learners, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.

Warschauer, M. (1996). "Computer-mediated Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice", Modern Language Journal, 18 (4), pp.470-481.