History of CALL

A THUMBNAIL SKETCH OF CALL HISTORY

CALL began in the 1960s with mainframe-based drill and practice materials, especially those based on the University of Illinois' PLATO system. It remained an insignificant alternative for  language learning outside of a few universities until the spread of the microcomputer into educational settings in the early 1980s. Early programs were written by teacher-developers on Apple II, IBM PC, and BBC computers, and were often distributed for free. Commercial programs, when available, were usually quite expensive but were generally more stable and technically sophisticated (though not as innovative). There was some work done with interactive laser disks during this time which provided the foundations for multimedia. The traditional language labs began to be replaced with dedicated computer labs for language learning, a trend that continues today.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, the Apple Macintosh replaced the Apple II in many educational settings in the US and became an immediate favorite among teacher-developers because of the support of HyperCard, a powerful but easy-to-use authoring program. The Mac had built-in sound, making it easier to work with than PCs, which had incompatible proprietary boards competing with one another. Early Macs (and HyperCard) did not support color, however, so commercial programs continued to appear for PCs. The PC market was also dominant in most countries outside the US because the machines could be obtained much more cheaply than Macs.  Reasonably-priced authoring programs became available for PCs, and with the development of the Windows operating system for PCs and standardization of sound formats, the distinction between PC and Mac became less critical.

During this period, the use of the computer as a tool increased, especially as teachers developed innovative techniques for using email and word processors became integrated into writing classes. Some teachers helped students develop their own HyperCard projects or ones in similar applications developed for the PC, such as ToolBook. It was observed that building collaborative projects around the computer and using computer mediated communication (CMC) activities had a strong effect on some students' motivations and seemed to make it easier for shy students to become involved. Some teachers built assignments around student interactions in multi-user domains (MUDs and MOOs), types of enriched chat environments.

Two major changes came starting in the mid-1990s. One was the dramatic increase in commercial multimedia for language learning as CD-ROMs became standard in home computers. The other was the development of the world wide web. Because of the web and increased access to the Internet in general, the past has seen a major shift toward tool uses, and many newcomers to CALL define the field almost entirely in those terms. Increasingly, CALL is being integrated into language learning activities both in and out of class. The first decade of the 21st century saw a continuation of all the previous areas along with the growth of language learning applications and activities for mobile devices, especially mobile phones (MALL), the spread of Web 2.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0) and social media, and experimentation with language learning in virtual worlds. In the 2010s we have the growth of tablets, rapid expansion of streaming media, ubiquitous computing (including wearable like watches); gamification, and increasing normalization, the last referring to a state where we're so used to technology we may stop thinking about it as creatively. The range of options continues to grow at a much faster pace than our understanding of them.

In 2009, I published a four-volume edited set, Computer Assisted Language Learning: Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Routledge), an anthology of 74 key articles covering the whole field of CALL. The introductory chapter, available at http://www.stanford.edu/~efs/callcc/callcc-intro.pdf, provides a more detailed overview of how the field developed through the late-2000s