Advanced search

EUROCALL 97 Conference Report (English)

EUROCALL 97, 11-13 September 1997
Dublin City University, UK

Report by Jane McKee,University of Ulster, Mathias Schulze, UMIST (Manchester, UK), and Mariona Sabate-Carrové, University of Lleida

The latest annual conference of EUROCALL at Dublin City University saw three days of hectic and profitable activity (four if we count the pre-conference workshops on the Wednesday).

Keynote Addresses

The central theme of the conference was set in the keynote address by Nina Garrett (Wesleyan University) who reformulated the conference topic in the question: "Where do research and practice meet?" and answered that the two meet in the design of the material. Her main conclusion was that CALL not only benefits from research in related disciplines such as Second Language Acquisition but also has a great deal to offer to these disciplines. Research is necessary to advance the teaching profession and multimedia computers are and will be very useful research tools for tasks such as gathering learner data. Chris Curran (Dublin City University), in his keynote, examined the current use of technology-based learning in education in North America and Europe, particularly in the areas of distance and independent learning. In a very informative paper, he also reviewed some of the economic, social and educational factors likely to affect the future development and successful use of technology in higher education. The third keynote address, given by Michel Perrin (France), explored the evolving relations between man and the computer in the light of the watershed represented by Deep Blue's defeat of Kasparov and examined the ways in which the computer is enabling us to liberate ourselves from the constraints of time and space and the implications of these developments for pedagogy, particularly in relation to the fostering of cognitive activity.

Parallel Paper Sessions

The conference also pursued its theme through parallel paper sessions on Design Principles, Evaluation, the Learning Process and Integration which ran throughout Thursday and Friday, together with shorter strands on the Web and Web Evaluation, Computer Mediated Conferencing, Distance Learning, Tools Design and Evaluation, Projects and Design and materials. In their formulation, these sessions reflected the concern, at the heart of the conference, not only to report on new or on-going work in the field but also to gain more academic recognition for work on CALL, linking it with other research disciplines such as education or psycho linguistics in order to strengthen its research potential and credibility.

The following summary is far from complete in its coverage, but we hope that it will give some idea of the quality and variety of the conference papers. Kurt Kohn and Angelika Reider (University of Tübingen) reported on a case study into the conditions of contextualised vocabulary acquisition. Their case study showed that multi-channeling within multimedia results in better attention, processing and retention by the students. Caroline Grace (Purdue University) discussed (psycho)linguistic aspects of vocabulary acquisition and their implication for software design. Her experiment indicates that students who had access to a glossary in L1 had a much higher retention rate of correct meanings because they had a chance to confirm the correct meanings. She concluded that certain personality types will be 'at risk' if correct meanings are not given for confirmation. Michael Levy (University of Queensland) compared constructivist and socio-cultural views of learning and their implications for CALL. He argued for more critical research into collaborative learning. Joseph Rézeau (University of Rennes) explored the interaction between the learner, the computer, the teacher and the knowledge to be acquired, investigating positive and negative reactions among his students to using a computer for language learning and also recording students at work with the program to examine the learning process as experienced by the learner and the contribution of the learner to that process.

In the Design Principles strand, Chris Jones (Manchester Metropolitan University) identified two major design strategies for computer-assisted vocabulary acquisition: personalise and contextualise. Marie-Josée Hamel (UMIST, Manchester) reported on courseware produced by the SAFRAN project for Bulgarian learners of French. The phonetics modules which have been completed make good use of a highly sophisticated speech synthesis tool and a French parser.

There were a number of papers on evaluation. Jane McKee and John Gillespie (University of Ulster) assessed the effectiveness of the integration of various CALL programs (MetaText, TAP, MCQ) into the teaching of a number of language courses at Ulster and adduced some general principles for curriculum development from their experience. Joan Abarbanel (Tel Aviv University) using a control group to assess differences in performance between students using CALL and their peers taught by traditional methods, found that the CALL students performed better. Paul Hickman (University of Southampton) discussed the way in which effective use of various CALL packages produced by the TELL Consortium, including TransIt TIGER and his own GramEx and GramDef can help students enhance their accuracy and confidence in the manipulation of the written language. Antonio Borraccino (University of Westminster) described the system which he had introduced for using the computer to provide feedback on independent learning in Italian, allowing credit for near misses and building in consultation by e-mail with the tutor for areas of uncertainty.

In the Tools Design and Evaluation strand, Blaise Nkwenti-Azeh (UMIST, Manchester) outlined linguistic and software engineering considerations which guided the upgrading of a conceptual dictionary for CALL which had been developed by a team at UMIST within the TELL Consortium. Finally, in the Integration strand, Liam Murray (Warwick University) discussed the effectiveness of the integration of the Téle-téxtes package into the curriculum for non-specialist language students who used it in groups to produce teaching materials for future learners.

Show & Tell/Poster Sessions and Seminars

This year, the Show and Tell sessions were timetabled after the parallel papers sessions, a welcome improvement. The 28 sessions offered demonstrations and descriptions of a wide range of activities and packages, from parallel concordancing (Universities of Birmingham and Nancy II) to uses of the Internet at second level (IES "Gabriel A. de Herrera", Spain). The poster session, particularly when all exhibitors were present on Friday afternoon, offered information about activities ranging from the creation of a pedagogical database for self access language learners (Trinity College Dublin) to work on video-conferencing (Potsdam University) and a report on a program for teaching Catalan (University of Lleida). Finally, the seminar sessions on Saturday were a welcome innovation, giving participants the opportunity to learn from each other, contribute their own views and, in the case of the research seminar, suggest certain new activities to the EUROCALL Committee. All in all, this was a very enjoyable and informative conference.

Conference Proceedings