Last CALL

To my mind, the most useful CALL tools possess the following properties: accessibility, ease of use, a justifiable purpose, and popularity. Accessibility and ease of use as criteria should be self-evident; as instructors, our primary focus should be on language instruction, not promoting technological fluency for its own sake. In the same vein, any technology used as an instructional tool should justify its own use beyond a fascination with gadgetry or virtual settings. Popularity should never be overlooked, in considering that those tools that are already in wide use by students should, by association, already be accessible and easy to use, thereby cutting down on time wasted on acclimating them to the tool of choice.

I will certainly be using CALL in the future (if it’s available where I teach) but I will do so only following the above criteria and caveats. Still, there’s a lot to be said for using technology for what we do, and I can only imagine we will become more reliant on it with time.