Entry 2: Evolution of CALL, Search Engines and Online Database

Assalamualaikum and a very good day everyone. Today I am going to talk about Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). On my recent class, my lecturer taught us about the evolution of CALL.

First of all, what is CALL? CALL is an approach to language teaching and learning in which the computer is used as an aid to the presentation, reinforcement and assessment of material to be learned, usually including a substantial interactive element. Next I would like to give a light briefing on the history of call. It started back in 1960s' and CALL was used widely on 1970s' by American Universities such as University Of Illinois. CALL was used on a mainframe computers at that time. When the arrival of personal computer (PC), CALL get into its booming era. Most of the program at that time was associated with programmed instruction. CALL had been updated since then and helped a lot of people.

There are a few types of CALL which are behaviorist CALL, communicative CALL and integrated CALL. I will explain each one them briefly so that all of you can get the idea of these types of CALL.

Firstly, behaviorist CALL is one of the earliest CALL invented. It consists of a programmed that follow strict instruction from the computer. Computer will be the tutor for the students and it will give direct negative or positive feedback to the students. The exercises that usually use behaviorist CALL are vocabulary tutorials, drill and practice programs, and language testing instruments. For your information, behaviorist CALL is still use till these days.

Next, I will explain about communicative CALL. Communicative CALL emerged in the late 1970s' and early 1980s'. It uses audio lingual- approach to focus on language as a medium of communication. Besides, how communicative CALL works are by grammar implicitly rather than explicitly. The computers also will not tell the students that they are wrong and it is flexible with students' answers. Now, I will share the differences between behaviorist CALL and communicative CALL.

 

The final type of CALL that I am going to talk is integrated CALL. Integrated CALL is the third phase of CALL development that response to lots of critics from communicative CALL. In this phase,practitioners have focused their efforts on integrating the teaching of language skills into content-based tasks, authentic interactions, and collaborative projects that provide direction and coherence. Since, multimedia and internet were booming at that time, they changes the way how people learned and used computers especially CALL. 

In conclusion, I had learned something new in detail about CALL. I wish I could used this knowledge one day and help others in improving themselves in language learning.

Search Engine and Online Data Base

First of all, do you know what is search engine? Search is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web. Most of the people get confused between search engine and world wide web. World wide web is the website that bring us directly to the site. Search engine is use to assist us to find the website that we need to use.

 

Each search engines have their own database to store the information that the users need. To assist the search engines, they will need some parts which are database to store references to web pages, web crawlers to find and compile indexes of web pages, user interface (UI) and information retrieval system (IRS).

Web Crawlers are program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Most of the search engines use spidering to make their database up to date.

 

  

Next, what is user interface?  The user interface (UI) is everything designed into an information device with which a person may interact. This include the web design ans display screen. users will prefer a simple and user friendly search engines to assist them in doing their search.

 

Finally, I will briefly explained about information retrieval system (IRS). IRS is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to an information need from a collection of information resources.The search engines will arrange the result for us from the most to the less related subject that we are searching.