CALL 97

[ Conference Reports ]

Theory and Practice of Multimedia in CALL

21-23 September 1997
University of Exeter, UK

Report by Jenny Parsons, CTI Modern Languages, University of Hull

This conference lived up to its title, providing a forum for a number of papers closely focused on multimedia CALL. Most papers were based on practical applications for which the theoretical framework was presented in detail in the papers. If I have a general criticism it would be that presenters, who quite rightly limited their half hour presentations to the principles informing their projects, were left with little opportunity to demonstrate their materials in depth or allow hands-on exploration. Since the conference was not too large (just over a hundred people), it was possible to arrange ad hoc demos with presenters with laptops, but nevertheless some time in the programme for a courseware fair might have allowed participants to see how the principles sent out in the presentations had been achieved in practice.

There was a wide variety of objectives and approaches in the papers I attended. Most sessions ran in parallel so inevitably choices had to be made. I attended papers where the focus of the application was receptive skills, dictation, integration of factual knowledge with language learning, creative writing, practising model dialogues interactively, conversation dynamics and strategies, and the exploitation of video footage. In almost all cases the approach taken suited the task admirably, and represented a move away from the early days of multimedia when the aim seemed to be to deliver a program that would do everything .

Other papers focused on process, describing provision of a simple self-access vocabulary aid suited to local requirements, or on the importance of feedback in CALL programs. I was particularly interested in projects where evaluations had been carried out, and projects where teachers had developed materials which could be customised I also enjoyed a very practical paper on speech recognition, setting out the limitations of using current speech recognition technology for language learning, and demonstrating the implementation of those activities which were regarded as useful given the current state of the technology.

Interestingly, one evaluation carried out on the use of a program using video, subtitles and comprehension tasks, indicated that recall and reuse of language from a video clip was better when students were restricted to the video and subtitles, compared with another group who had access to video, subtitles and comprehension exercises. Perhaps there is such a thing as too many media.

Frank Borchardt of Duke University, until recently Executive Director of CALICO, was an important presence at the conference. He gave a stimulating opening address on screen design, tracing the metaphors used since the advent of the computer screen and making a plea for a move away from the passive display of text. His contributions at question times were also pertinent, arguing the case for intelligent feedback and anticipating that speech recognition would eventually become important in pronunciation work.

Other plenary speakers included John Holder from the Southampton Institute, presenting recent findings on attempts to introduce directed learning involving the Internet. Elspeth Broady of the University of Brighton described work done with student pairs in which computer feedback was given to students as to why their responses were incorrect. The pairing is designed to increase reflection and awareness via student discussion. Glyn Holmes, University of Western Ontario, presented in detail the results of a questionnaire completed by student users of different multimedia CALL programs, one commercial and two produced 'in house'.

The conference also found room for interesting papers on parallel concordancing, and EFL internet resources. More technical approaches to the use of computers in language teaching were represented by papers on Natural Language Processing for question and answer generation, and the development of a grammar checker for EFL using a parser and refining the output by asking the user questions. Also of interest was a description of the development of a public domain cross-platform chat facility which can handle sound files and provides a shared white-board.

Exeter University provided excellent accommodation and meals, for which participants were very grateful as they all had to work so hard! The programme was very full, with two plenary papers after dinner each evening. The conference attracted participants from 22 different countries and so provided a good opportunity to meet new people and exchange ideas.

I have contact details for the presenters of all the topics mentioned above, so if you are particularly interested to follow up anything mentioned here, please email me on [email protected]