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Beyond Form‐Based Drill and Practice: Meaning‐Enhancing CALL on the Macintosh
Author(s) -
Chun Dorothy M.,
Brandl Klaus K.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
foreign language annals
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.258
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1944-9720
pISSN - 0015-718X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1944-9720.1992.tb00538.x
Subject(s) - computer science , meaning (existential) , hypermedia , sentence , context (archaeology) , software , negotiation , resource (disambiguation) , foreign language , word (group theory) , human–computer interaction , multimedia , linguistics , artificial intelligence , programming language , psychology , paleontology , computer network , philosophy , political science , law , psychotherapist , biology
By examining options in available software, we differentiate between new software for the Macintosh computer, which extends hypermedia capabilities to enable more meaning‐enhancing exercises, and the purely form‐based corrective exercises found in existing programs. Many of the programs for teaching foreign languages which are currently on the market are labeled interactive because they provide immediate feedback in the form of error correction and record keeping. In addition, many contain integrated hypermedia, i.e., they incorporate visual, audio, and graphic features in order to simulate genuine language and provide other nonlinguistic stimuli. However, the great majority of these programs are in essence form‐based drill and practice exercises. The new software we present contains meaning‐enhancing exercises, which provide both thematic and visual context and coherence, and which highlight the differences in meaning resulting from differences in form. Our so‐called Communicative Gap Exercises: 1) engage the user in a meaningful interaction or negotiation with the computer (there is missing information that the user tries to uncover or an agreement that needs to be negotiated); and 2) give users the opportunity to input complete sentences and to receive feedback about each word in the sentence, in contrast to the many programs which generally require users to fill in one‐word blanks.