Explanation for teachers
While Computer-Assisted Language Learning has made great progress in the last two decades and has become an integral part of language teaching in many situations, there are still some key problems restricting its effectiveness. Focusing on student-computer interaction (as opposed to student-student interaction through computer-mediated communication), most CALL is closed-ended and gives little choice for students. For example, most language learning multimedia software and most language learning exercise websites consist largely of multiple-choice and matching exercises. In classroom teaching, in contrast, there has been a movement towards more open-ended tasks and projects giving more student choice and responsibility. This contrast between this progress in the nature of classroom teaching and the traditional approaches used in most CALL is worrying.
This website aims to give students far more choice in their learning and to be more open-ended than most student-computer CALL. The key features of the website are that students can choose any text they want to use in the activity (although the site will be slower with longer texts), and that the input for the vocabulary exercises also comes from the students. It is hoped that these features will form a new model for how student-computer CALL can be conducted.
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