Tips for Teaching with CALL: Practical Approaches to Computer-Assisted Language Learning [with CD].

Chapter three, focusing on reading, begins by stating that reading is difficult for "unskilled" (p. 63) learners, so it is important to familiarize students with the different contexts, genres, and texts that they are likely to read on the Internet. One of the most obvious, yet important, tips is for teachers to choose appropriate Web sites and reading texts (a few examples are provided), emphasize the vocabulary, and help students to understand the salient lexical and grammatical forms in online texts. Chapelle and Jamieson also stress the importance of using online support resources, such as glossaries, corpora, tutorials, and dictionaries. Finally, the authors add that "explicit teaching is better than simply letting the students sink or swim in their own reading" (p. 79), a criticism of those approaches that emphasize textual input alone may be sufficient to learn a language (e.g., Krashen, 2006). The CD-ROM demonstrates Tip Six, "Include evaluation of learners' comprehension and language knowledge," with Longman English Interactive 3 (www.esl.net/englishinteractive_34.html) by showing how a learner completes a reading quiz, submits responses, and checks the score. In the simulation of Tip One, "Select CALL materials with appropriate reading texts," with Adult Learning Activities (www.cdlponline.org/), the user chooses a reading topic and a story, looks at two versions of the story, and tries a variety of grammar learning activities, games, writing short answers and so on. One of the positive aspects of this chapter is that many of the described activities might have been difficult for teachers to design on their own. One of the aspects that Chapelle and Jamieson fail to give the relevant importance in this chapter is to the use of real materials. Certainly, it is not difficult to understand the importance of free reading in language learning--and the Internet is an abundant source of reading input that usually may or may not require direct instruction, which appears to be the key aspect of teaching and learning in this chapter. As the authors say: "Call activities make it easy to find texts that are at the appropriate level of difficulty" (p. 65). Perhaps it is the texts that make the CALL activities valid and valuable for learning.

Chapter four deals with writing. It emphasizes how important writing has become in our daily lives for professional and non-professional communication, for example, through e-mail. The chapter presents a list of software and online programs that help students write and contextualize their work according to genre, purpose, and audience. The CD-ROM demonstration addresses Tip Six, "Help learners to develop their writing strategies," using the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE 7) (www.daedalus.com), in which a learner chooses a topic to write about, answers questions about the topic, and begins an essay with a pre-writing activity. The simulation on the CD-Rom of Tip One asks a student to "select appropriate writing texts as models" with WriteFix (www.writefix.com/), explores arguments for an essay, examines organization and paragraphing, and "look[s] at a complete model essay for transition words or phrases"(CD-ROM). A positive aspect of this chapter is the presentation of Web sites that can assist learners in the process of editing and monitoring their writing. Overall, this may be one of the most useful chapters in the book because these Web sites can make students more aware of the importance of editing and monitoring their own language production.

Chapter five deals with listening. The authors see listening as a constructive process that "involves decoding, comprehension and interpretation" (p. 125) and requires the speaker's attention and knowledge to achieve understanding in real time. According to the authors, to select appropriate listening materials, teachers should look for those that have "already been categorized by level [and that have] relevance to the ESL learner, and that [have] pre-listening activities intended to activate [the] student's background knowledge" (p. 127), as well as top-down and bottom-up activities. Teachers should also help students to develop autonomy in choosing materials themselves. The authors recommend using videos to enrich listening activities and provide examples to help improve the quality of teaching listening. On the CD-Rom, Tip Three suggests teachers "[p]rovide learners with opportunities for selective listening activities based on what they are hearing," and offers a demonstration of Planet English (http://www.planetenglish.com/ in which a student reads the instructions for a listening activity while paying attention to a specific piece of information, and then writes a personal note using that information. The simulation shows a cultural activity from Longman English Interactive 3 (http://www.esl.net/englishinteractive_34.html) video and writing a personal note. In this chapter, Chapelle and Jamieson present resources, most of them free that can be accessed by teachers worldwide making this chapter an excellent resource for teachers in multinational environments. This chapter is valuable for many teachers who may struggle to find listening materials, although podcasts are increasingly becoming a common source of different recordings with different accents and registers. In this sense the section "help learners develop their strategies for listening online" (p. 145) gives some ideas that teachers should emphasize in their classes.

Chapter six deals with speaking and pronunciation. Chapelle and Jamieson state that the Internet is a convenient tool for obtaining speaking and pronunciation input because language learners can use it autonomously. The authors also suggest that the Internet makes students more confident about their speaking skills because practice is not subject to in-classroom anxiety from which some less confident students may suffer. Computers can also be used to complete dialogues, thereby possibly increasing fluency because "automaticity of oral language [will develop] through oral practice" (p. 159) and interaction with the computer. In the evaluation section, Chapelle and Jamieson recommend "software that provides visual feedback that plots the learner's speech signal on the screen" (p. 162). Using Tell Me More (www.tellmemore.com/) for the demonstration of Tip 3, "Provide opportunities for oral practice through interaction with the computer," a student simulates a chat with a computer program (with answer recognition). More interesting practice is presented in Tip Four, "Evaluate learners' performance and provide feedback" (Connected Speech, http://www.masterspokenenglish.com/index.html); in this software program for phonology development, the user listens to a video monologue, segments the pauses in a text, checks the answers, records his/her voice, and obtains feedback from the computer. In short, teachers who want to place special emphasis on pronunciation, or those non-native speakers who feel that that their speech is not a good source of accurate pronunciation input, may find excellent ideas on the teaching of pronunciation, which often tends to be neglected. The main problem with pronunciation, which is not mentioned by the authors, is that the current software tends to adopt one accent at the time (say, British, American, or Australian). Certainly pronunciation can be improved through listening, but this was not addressed by the authors at all. A key concern is that the authors fail to recognize that there is still some empirical work necessary to be done in the area of pronunciation before we can make assumptions regarding the productive potential of CALL applications to improve pronunciation. On the other hand, the authors propose the interesting idea that using CALL to obtain "formulaic sequences" (p. 159) can become a valuable drive to memorize chains of words that eventually become a part of the learner's speaking repertoire. In this sense, it is relevant to mention their support of using computers to trigger the speaker's "automaticity" (p. 159), which is relevant to speaking as it is to the communication skills referred to in the following chapter.

Chapter seven, focusing on communication skills, conveys that "technology is an important part of normal communication for students" today (p. 171), and those students learn to communicate through communicating. Among the pros of Internet communication, the authors consider the ability to speak to people in distant locations, which can give students extra motivation. The authors see the challenge for teachers to design activities that promote both synchronous and asynchronous communication and reflective conversations that go beyond mere social interaction. Chapelle and Jamieson suggest that pen pal Web sites, messenger forums, or chat spaces can fulfill this goal, supported by online tutorials, dictionaries, and other resources. The CD-Rom demonstration presents online chat (using Microsoft Windows Live Player) while the practice-yourself section deals with how to contact and work with e-pals (online pen pals) through Web sites like Linguistic Funland TESL Pen Pal Center (www.linguistic-funland.com). This chapter provides good examples of effective use of synchronous and asynchronous communication devices and software to develop the students' communication abilities in controlled classroom environments.

The final chapter addresses expected learning outcomes when CALL is used as an additional component to enhance language teaching. According to Chapelle and Jamieson "students who have experienced the CALL activities described [...] while studying English are likely to develop the types of strategies and habits [...] demonstrated [in this book]" (p. 212). Chapter Eight also addresses possible risks of using the Internet, such as plagiarism, criminal uses of the Web, technical problems with equipment and software, and varying levels of teacher familiarity with computers. In addition, this chapter also reviews the benefits of using the Internet as a source of readings, podcasts, and contextualized materials to obtain specific information for teaching languages for the professions, as well as English for Specific Purposes (ESP). This approach to online materials can be seen on the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM demonstration for Chapter Eight provides an example of an activity "that explicitly teach[es] field-specific language [in this case, medicine]" (Tip Two): a cartoon of a doctor-patient interaction at Englishmed.com (www.englishmed.com/). In the CD simulation, the user listens to a conversation between two business people, fills in a sales chart, and consults the conversation transcript and a glossary, followed by a cloze test activity using Talking Business Intermediate (http://www.pearsonlongman.com/ae/multimedia/programs/TB.htm).

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