コンピュータ利用の語学教育 : 東京女子大学ドイツ語CALLを中心に

It seems that while the application of computers has become ubiquitous in everyday life with the rapid development of new technologies, we feel reluctant to utilize computers for educational purposes. The main reasons why CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) is still in an experimental stage are the scantiness of available good coursewares, the cost and time of development and the lack of concern of language teachers. The way we are skeptical of CALL is similar to the initial resistance to the appearance of the language laboratory as a technological innovation in language learning. Now we are exploiting language laboratory as a rich linguistic environment in communicative language learning by using new teaching methods. To discover and evaluate how CALL contributes to foreign language learning and how CALL fits into the language curriculum, I made a German elementary CALL course using an authoring program and put it into practice in 1991. This is a tutorial course which is intergrated with normal classroom work, and can explain subjects, assign drills and practices, prepare sentence clues for each question, give explanatory comments to some wrong answers and give feedback comments. Since the purpose of this coures is not to test but to learn, learners who make mistakes can try to answer three times by referring to clues and explanations. The important characteristic of this coures is that each question has several anticipated wrong answers with error messages which lead learners to the right answer. Moreover error messages are the words of support and caution which demonstrate where learners have gone wrong. This CALL course is planned to be revised and improved year by year by analyzing the ample error data resulting from the use of the program, and by attaching new anticipated errors with suitable messages. In answering a questionnaire, almost all students said that this German CALL course was very effective in helping them to notice their weak points in grammar and they enjoyed its amusing feedback messages. As a result, CALL can be profitably exploited in elementary language learning. The computer is just a mechanical tool which cannot replace teachers, but can be utilized effectively as a part of a language teaching program