Peter Rich and Dr. Devon Asay, Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature

As technology improves and its popularity increase, more and more people are turning to electronic methods of education. CALL, computer assisted language learning, is one particular field that has tried to jump on the bandwagon. However, recreating real environments and random interaction poses a constant challenge for CALL developers and administrators and very few effective CALL systems exist. That is, live interaction continues to be more effective than nearly every CALL system.

With this in mind I set out to create the first unit in an effective CALL system. This idea initially came to me as I began to learn the basics of programming using a program called Revolution. Because I only had the basics I naturally took to learning more and purchased the Revolution program with scholarship funds so I could work on this project at home.

While I versed myself in programming, I began the first series of games with two other Revolution students. We decided that one great advantage of CALL is the fact that a computer does not get bored or annoyed with repetition, a key element in second language acquisition. Games are by far the best way to get people not only to repeat words, exercises, etc., but also to hook them on doing it. We planned the first three lessons on: basic directions, the “to be” copula and personal pronouns, soon discovering that game design is no easy task. We then developed the games and tested them on a small group for usability and efficiency. Given our limited programming ability the games were also limited, which did not satisfy my demands for effective learning. In fact, I discovered that to reach beyond the average CALL program requires much more than a strong will and a few basic programming skills.

I originally had planned on a teacher-aided CALL system that teachers could use in the schools and that would be updated monthly by a server administrator using his own research and submitted findings from community users. After evaluating my first steps of the project I decided on a different route—individualized learning. From the beginning and in our test lessons I always planned on individualized lessons. As I discovered a year earlier while conducting adult literacy research, not everybody learns the same way or for the same reasons. Using the principle of mascots, the students were allowed to choose from a variety of computer characters that met their own criteria and liking (e.g. Hispanic teenagers could choose a Hispanic teenage mascot, white males a white male, etc.). Another very important factor to what I perceive as effective CALL is randomness, something very natural to human assisted language learning but almost foreign to CALL. In order to appeal to both factors, I decided to change my program to entirely personalized environments and conditions, much like a computer game at home.

Having changed my course of action I decided I needed to assess each student’s language level at the beginning of their CALL experience. Since there was no longer any human intervention (whereas there was a teacher before), I decided I needed to create some sort of effective rating system via computer. Some very important factors came into play with this new approach. First, I needed to assess reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, the four main second language acquisition skills. Second, the test could not be as long as typical such tests already in use (the one at BYU’s ELC takes two hours to complete). After all, this is a computer game, not an entrance exam.

I teamed up with another ESL student, April Brady, and we began looking into the possibility and accuracy of simply asking the students what ability level they felt they were at for the target language (the language to be learned). Upon discussion with an ESL testing teacher, Dr. Diane Strong-Krausse, we discovered that she had the very same questions and had already done some unpublished research on the subject. She had very conclusive evidence that people accurately rate themselves in speaking and writing, but are quite wrong in assessing their own listening and reading skills. Great! This meant that for speaking and writing, the two most difficult areas to test electronically, we could simply ask people their current level. We then developed short listening and reading tests for native Spanish and Portuguese speakers. While the readings and spoken sections were in English, the target language, the test items were in their native language. This was for accuracy in determining their cognitive abilities to interpret only the spoken and written texts. After discarding a number of items, we used a small test group to evaluate our items. Item analysis revealed that only about half of the items were at all effective and that one item yielded the reverse effect (all the advanced students missed it, while the less-advanced students got it right).

With these two initial attempts at development I began realizing the scope of any effective CALL system and that of this project. I knew that more research was necessary if I wanted the language learning to be effective and not an eclectic mesh of a programmer’s ideas. I needed expert experience in many aspects. With such in mind I began interviewing and researching different language schools and programs and decided on a Brazilian English teaching franchise, whose methods I find particularly effective and conducive to this program. I omit their name for business reasons but am now pursuing an effective but costly interactive graphics program in which to develop the intended software. Upon developing the program, I plan on creating an on-line community with which different students can electronically interact, read current events, and hopefully even see movies in the target language. My little ORCA project has gone from an interest to a dream which I hope to realize within the next five years, as I continue to develop it as a graduate student in Instructional Technology.