Current Applications Of CALL: Teachers' Views And Practices

With a short history of two to three decades in China, great achievements has already been made in the area of computer assisted language learning both in terms of theoretical, practical research and courseware development. However, according to Ma's (2003) research, the benefits of CALL exerted in college English teaching was rather limited, which leads to the question: what is the current situation of CALL practice in high school now? Unless with a clear picture in one's mind, no one can make appropriate policies to better promote the advancement of CALL research and practice.According to the statistics and analysis of the previous studies on CALL published in the most influential ten foreign language journals in China in the past ten years, classroom practice of multimedia technology dominates the picture (43.1%), the majority of which are detailed introductions of how a specific English class is conducted within CALL environment, few concerns the overall current application of CALL in school.This study attempts to make a deep research into the current applications of CALL from the perspective of teachers at three sample high schools in Longgang, Shenzhen. Survey questionnaire and follow-up interviews are adopted in this research. The targets are English teachers from three high schools in Longgang, the overall teaching power of which are among the first rank, second rank and third rank respectively. The research mainly explore the following four aspects: 1) the availability of computer hardware and software in schools; 2) teachers'expertise and attitudes toward CALL as well as the correlation between the two; 3) the current applications of CALL in high schools; 4) the factors that influence teachers'use of CALL; 5) their perceived needs of CALL training.The findings are briefly summarized as follows: 1) high schools in Longgang are usually equipped with advanced hardware facilities, yet they are in serious need of necessary high quality software which is the key to effective implementation of CALL; 2) the vast majority of the teachers hold a positive attitude towards CALL, proportional to their CALL knowledge; 3) to some extent teachers are indeed incorporating computer into their teaching, however, their use was very limited and consisted mainly of word-processing and using the internet for information retrieval; 4) lack of time and insufficient high quality software are important factors affecting teachers'adoption of CALL; 5) CALL training courses should be tailored to the specific needs of English teachers.The study provides an outlook for high school English teachers to better improve their teaching efficiency as well as teaching quality of CALL.