© 1988 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
Designing CALL programs for communicative teaching
Vivian Cook started as a lecturer in English as a Foreign Language at Ealing Technical College, London, moved to North-East London Polytechnic to run a Polytechnic Language Service, and since 1978 has been a lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Essex University. His current interests are CALL, first and second language acquisition, and the uses of contemporary linguistic theories. He has written on first language acquisition (Young Children and Language, Arnold 1979), on second language learning (Experimental Approaches to Second Language Learning, Pergamon 1986), and on current Chomskyan theory (Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, Blackwell 1988), as well as several EFL coursebooks such as Active Intonation (Longman 1968) and People and Places (Pergamon 1980).
This article describes three stages in the development of CALL programs to fit the communicative approach to language teaching, which is here understood as an approach that emphasizes meaningful interaction and information exchange.
The three stages are exemplified by programs called Escape from Utopia (based on an ELIZA keyword-matching technique), Shannon's Game (a syntactic parser approach that uses PROLOG), and Station (an information-processing approach that also uses PROLOG). The three stages exemplify progressively deeper ways of handling language by computer. The article suggests that the first stage superficially allows students to interact meaningfully with the computer, and that keyword matching has severe limitations and is incapable of further development. The second stage, parsing, is considered an improvement on traditional teacher techniques rather than a contribution to the communicative approach. The third stage is regarded as more fully usable within communicative methodology, since it requires programs that represent and handle information as well as parse structure.
The article concludes that there is no necessary incompatibility between the communicative approach and CALL, even if considerable development is needed.