Nina Garrett, CALL doyenne par excellence, has (yet again) hit a home run with her call for practitioners and publications to “establish a disciplinary track-record that will allow old-timers and newcomers alike to understand how language pedagogy has and has not changed with changing technologies and how earlier materials and research can be recognized as basic to current theory, practice, and research.” She gave great examples of how researchers and developers have in essence, been delivering “the same pedagogy as materials in earlier formats” because they were “unaware of similarities in pedagogical purpose or of the research conducted earlier” leading to “a kind of ‘reinvention of the wheel’ that undermines the seriousness of CALL”.
<applause>It is about time someone came out and said this here!</applause>
While I might take issue with not emphasizing strongly enough the need to develop new (rather that to apply “old”) frameworks, concepts and theory, there is an urgent need for CALL researchers and practitioners to deeply understand CALL history, and for the profession to take itself seriously by making its past easily accessible and searchable online via metadata.
I know that IALLT is doing something about this. Is CALICO? EUROCALL? Anybody else?
