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ICANEWS Noviembre / Diciembre 2008, Año 5 # 18

The goal of CALL

Part I
 In my own life time experience we have moved from audio-lingual to communicative methods to many other incarnations of language teaching, and sometimes back again. Despite what we know about how students learn, observation in language classrooms still finds most historical methods in use somewhere, with the majority based on a drill system. Although practice does have its place, we seem to ignore the fact that individual and cultural differences impact learning.  The authentic, emotionally significant, content-based, differentiated experiences that will have a lasting impact on learners are all too absent from regular and language classrooms even though the technologies to make them real might be present. With the foci of language education on discrete points of language, passing tests such as the FCE or others, and the push to use technology for anything as long as it is used for something, the bigger picture of the end of education is often ignored.
 
In CALL Essentials (2005), Egbert laid out what many leading educators believe are the skills needed to survive and make one's way  in the 21st century. Certainly language literacy is one skill, and computer literacy another, but as or more important are the thinking skills that help learners become literate and encourage them to keep learning and striving after their language class is over. Standards for both child and adult language learning indicate that we expect individuals to become more effective thinkers. Without critical and creative thinking, and the ability  to produce, to communicate, to inquire, and to solve   problems, language learners may have control over aspects of the language but not be able to do anything important with language to change their lives and the lives of those around them. This ability is not only the goal of education, but also the goal of CALL

Reasons
Our narrow focus on skills and the traditional set-up that divides curricula into language categories keeps us from truly addressing this goal. There are surely a lot of reasons why this might be so. However, the fact that computers are being used to support, in a great number of classrooms, the same old traditions of teaching and learning indicates that we have yet also to figure out  how to reach the ultimate goal of CALL and work on learning and individual needs. It also implies that the powerful potential of the computer as a learning tool is yet to be realized in “CALL” classrooms. It might therefore be more effective to build the expectation that technology will be employed where  effective, rather than regard it as a special feature of certain classrooms that only some teachers use.
There is the false idea of CALL as a “method” and of giving technology unwarranted emphasis as a crucial component of any language program.  It has led to the notion that teachers must master a standard set of skills; this even though effective  technology use, like any tool use, is contextual. The focus on teacher skills is underscored by the technology standards currently in development by TESOL separate from learner and teacher standards.

Another claim for emphasizing CALL as a specialization is that researchers spend time studying it, and therefore it needs a label. However, if that argument were applied consistently, Egbert claims that “we'd have “fields” or “areas” such as “Learner-Centred Teaching” and “Women's Strategies in Language Learning” and possibly “Pencil Supported Writing.” “Perhaps it makes sense to look at CALL as something different until we understand more about it. In the long run, it just does not make sense to single out integral parts of  teaching, learning, and research as fields or areas rather than addressing them as integrated, important parts of a whole.