Tuesday, October 28, 2008

CALL Associations




I imagine you have read something related to something called EUROCALL or CALICO in the introductory chapter from your book. These are two of the most important CALL associations in the world. They have their own publications, annual conferences, SIG (Special Interest Groups), newsletters, etc, in the same way other professional associations do.

The first one, EUROCALL stands for European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning and it is the main authority of CALL in this continent. There is also another one called Learning Technologies (an IATEFL Sig) named in the past "Comp IATEFL SIG, since for this association the concept of CALL has now changed. EUROCALL has also a relevant publication, called ReCall.

CALICO is the equivalent in the American continent.

Here you are other CALL associations:

http://www.mariajordano.com/call/call_home.htm#associations




Language teachers vs software developers?



According to the following quote from Mike Levy (1997:1):

Developers in user-friendly human-computers interfaces and higher-level languages and authoring systems insulate the developer from the lower level workings of the computer, allowing comparatively complex applications to be written with relative ease.

Do you actually think that applications to create quizzes like "Hotpotatoes" are perfectly easy and intuitive to use stuff for language teachers or they need some special training and knowledge to use them?

Use the comments button to answer to this question either in English or Spanish.