Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in English-language teaching

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) strikes an unfamiliar note especially on many a paranoid and computer-illiterate teachers in the language teaching circles. Nevertheless, it may also come as a surprise to these teachers that CALL has been around for quite some time since its early experimentations in the 60s. The United States was the earliest to experiment with the idea of using the computer to teach foreign languages to university students. The Stony Brooke Project was one of its earliest experiments which used computer-programmed materials to teach elementary German to English-speaking students of the State University (Underwood 1984: 41). Soon Britain followed suit and developed similar versions of computer-assisted learning programmes. In fact Britain’s entry into this field was instrumental in bringing about the term CALL which, in recent years, has gained much popularity in the American ‘English as a Second and Foreign Language’ (ESL/EFL) circles. In Malaysia, CALL is very much in its state of infancy. An awareness of CALL only began to ‘infiltrate’ the Malaysian language teaching circle in the late 80s and early 90s. Even then, it was confined to a very small group of Malaysian language teachers who had developed an early interest in computer-aided instruction and had the privilege of actually using computers to prepare teaching materials. When computer literacy first permeated the Malaysian educational arena in the mid 80s, computers were mainly used by teachers and students from the science and technical fields. CALL then was an echoic term barely heard, identified, let alone experimented with by language teachers all over Malaysia.