Hey everyone, welcome back.

I was given an assignment for this blog which, I have to admit, took me some time to get my head around. The assignment is to create my very own “Multimedia CALL package wish list“.  As someone who constantly reminds everyone around me how much I dislike technology and its essential (unforgiving) place in modern life, I can’t say I was too thrilled about the topic. After some sulking and under-breath muttering ,I have finally gathered my thoughts enough to try and make sense of what exactly it is that I would like from a CALL package.

After looking into the general criteria of CALL packages I have selected three features that I believe would impact my language learning in the most positive way.

The first feature I would add to my basket in a CALL package store is language skills. Everyone agrees that to become fully competent in any language you cannot simply stare at a book, learn off how to conjugate verbs and fill in the blanks in a few grammar questions at the end of the chapter. Undoubtedly grammar is an important aspect, but by no means is it the be all and end all of language learning. A “perfect” CALL package needs to help the learner accomplish accuracy in reading, writing, listening and speaking in the language they have chosen to devote time to learning. This means that the website or app needs to provide a variety of different tasks to test and help improve the learners capability in all four aspects of the language.

The second CALL package bonbon I would add to my pick’n’mix bag is for the programme to be learner-fit. Essentially what I mean by this is that there needs to be a competency test at the beginning and throughout the programme being used. This is necessary to ensure that the learner is not being subjected to boring, basic, beginner-level learning material, but is also not being quizzed on more complex grammatical or syntactical aspects of the language when they haven’t covered more basic material first. The CALL package needs to be programmed in such a way that it can effectively teach the language learner what they need to know, without skipping important information or boring the learner into quitting. How many times have we all started a new language on Duolingo and ended up bored or given up because the owl in the corner doesn’t explain the exceptions to already difficult sentence structures? Case in point.

The last, and in my opinion most important, feature that I desire in my dream CALL package is error correction and feedback. This might just be me, but my pet peeve is not getting feedback on work I have done until it’s too late e.g. submitting an essay halfway through the semester and not receiving feedback until after the final exams. How is anyone supposed to learn from their mistakes if their mistakes are not first highlighted and discussed? As any language learner will know, every rule has an exception and when we accidentally box in that exception with the rule we are taught, we are simply told ‘incorrect’ and maybe given the correct answer without any explanation. We don’t learn from this, and every learner is different. I believe the solution to this is to have ‘assignments’ of some sort at the end of every lesson/topic taught by the CALL package and to have an actual human being with teacher-like knowledge correcting and explaining errors. I understand that this will probably prevent the CALL package from being free, like we all hope for, but if you’re really passionate about improving your proficiency in any given languages then you will want help from the best website or app you can possibly find.

There you have it, some insight into my mind and thoughts on computer assisted language learning (something that has become far too prevalent in my life). What do you think ? Is there a feature I didn’t mention that is more important than one, or maybe all, of the features I’d hope for?

Until next time,

Kayla xo