"call (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) Materials Development" in: The tesol encyclopedia of English Language Teaching Online

 Pedagogical Implications
Where much of a traditional language class consists of tests or performance orien-
tation, CALL materials readily offer students the basis for mastery orientation. For 
example, a program like Quizlet (quizlet.com) can be used to quickly generate 
tests, but it may also be used by students to create their own self-tests, practice 
games, and flashcards with definitions, media (including audio and video) 
for illustrations, a record-keeping system, and an archive where productions may 
be shared with other users. On a more modest level, students can use PowerPoint 
to quickly create personalized flashcards with images from a Google search, 
drawings, audio or video, or all of these. Learning takes place as much through the 
creation of the materials as by practice with the products. Rather than create 
the products, the teachers’ role is to help students discover and organize appropri-
ate materials and use the tool to its best advantage.

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Content- and project-based learning (CBL and PBL) are inspiring ways to 
learn language: Mastery orientation is high where students can choose the con-
tent to be learned or are challenged to explore a subject area or process, particu-
larly where CBL/PBL is performed in groups with assigned roles within a team. 
WebQuests (webquest.org) are structured projects that have been used success-
fully with even very young children, where Web access is tightly controlled, as 
well as with adults, where the quest may be an open-ended research document 
on a subject chosen by the student. Quests may be archived and shared for a 
modest fee at the QuestGarden (questgarden.com/), which also contains a tem-
plate to develop quests. Teachers interested in projects online may lead their 
classes to collaborations around the globe, for example, in iEARN (International 
Resource and Education Network, www.iearn.org/), where students engage in 
projects to enhance learning and “make a difference” in their world. The increas-
ingly popular Maker Movement (see Le, 2015, for a short guide to understand-
ing the phenomenon) may be considered a further, more concrete manifestation 
of PBL, where students of all ages use technology tools to solve a problem and 
create and share the resulting physical product. Certainly, the constructivist 
view of learning (Piaget, 1950; Lave and Wenger, 1991, etc.) fits well with the 
CBL/PBL paradigm.
Tools for students and teachers to use in developing CALL lessons are 
plentiful. Screencasting tools (e.g., Jing, www.techsmith.com/jing.html, or 
Screencast-o-matic, www.screencast-o-matic.com/) are free and usually offer 
storage space to archive productions on the Web. Students can create an archive 
of screencasts showing and telling their peers how tools or websites work. 
They can also upload resulting videos to Google Drive and add subtitles they 
have written themselves (see Serwatuk, 2014). Screencasters may also be used 
for think-aloud procedures in writing classes, animated explanations of syntax 
or grammar, or requests or offers for help when a webpage is not working as 
promised. Any computer, tablet, or phone has the capability to create videos 
that may be edited with freely available software, either on a computer or 
online, and saved on the Internet (e.g., at TeacherTube, www. teachertube.
com/, or at YouTube, www.youtube.com). EmbedPlus (www. embedplus.com) 
lets the student embed annotations in a YouTube video and then upload it 
online. Blubbr (www.blubbr.tv) allows the user to add a short MCQ quiz at any 
point in a YouTube video. These tools let the teacher put what was formerly 
lecture material into the hands of students before class starts, or let students 
create notes and quizzes for each other.
For listening/speaking practice, teachers can have students keep a podcast of 
their activities (see for example, PodOmatic, www.podomatic.com; also a mobile 
app). The comment section allows for peer evaluation and formative assessment, 
and an RSS feed will tell the teacher when new materials are ready. A more sophis-
ticated tool like VoiceThread (voicethread.com; also for mobile devices) allows 
students to record an activity, pronunciation lesson, or narrative; other students 
(and the teacher) can make audio comments on the result, or engage live. Skype 
(www.skype.com) or Google Hangout (hangouts.google.com) are other ways to 

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hold live “conference calls” through a computer or mobile device. Students can 
collaborate on a project or get feedback in a virtual office hour with their teacher. 
ANVILL (2011), a free online course management system, goes far beyond the old 
language lab in offering teachers the means to develop listening materials in its 
interface, and allowing students to discuss topics orally (or in text) on voiceboards. 
With each of these tools, the teacher’s role is to plan the lesson, prepare the topic 
or prompts, direct the students to the appropriate tools, and provide formative 
assessment. Electronic voice tools are self-explanatory, use icons to indicate con-
trols, and usually require a headset (microphone and speakers or ear buds) to 
operate. The students’ role is to create presentations or engage in meaningful 
conversation, give peer feedback, and thereby sharpen their own listening and 
speaking skills.
In the realm of composition and writing practice, wikis and the Swiss army knife 
of wikis, Google Drive (drive.google.com/), offer the media-enhanced beauty of a 
webpage with little of the struggle. Students can create documents, add audio, 
video, and images, and download in various print-ready formats. Where blogs 
form a more static record of student writing (see Edublogs, edublogs.org/), wikis 
can easily be revised and updated by others (see PBWorks’ education version, 
www.pbworks.com/). However, in Drive, students may also collaborate together 
on a page in real time, with a text chat box and a Google audio chat or Skype on the 
side: They see each other’s changes and corrections live and can discuss them. The 
potential for peer editing and for the creation of collaborative projects is extensive. 
Presentations, spreadsheets with automatically generated graphs, forms (for creat-
ing tests or flashcards, among others), and even drawing tools are all available in 
Drive. However, for assessment of creative projects that students can achieve in a 
media-rich class, the teacher must begin with a rubric, preferably a rubric created 
with the assistance of his/her students. An explanation of rubrics, a rubric genera-
tor, and hundreds of pre-made rubric examples are available at Teacher Planet 
(www.teacherplanet.com/rubrics-for-teachers?ref=rubrics4teachers).
Finally, for reading and literature, the Web offers an almost infinite library of 
texts in dozens of languages. Mobile e-readers are readily available, and freely 
downloadable texts, articles, and books are found everywhere on the Internet. 
E-texts have the added functionalities of dictionary and Wikipedia referencing 
and note-taking. In addition, many Web sites allow students to interact with 
authors (see http://meettheauthor.com/) or create their own literary events, 
such as a Poetry Slam (www.poetryslam.com). One advantage to reading elec-
tronically is the possibility of taking notes and archiving one’s finds in a personal 
digital library, such as Diigo (www.diigo.com). A teacher might assign a digital 
text, request a reading journal be kept on a wiki or in Google Drive or in a podcast 
or blog, and additionally ask students to take notes and create synopses in a 
shared digital archive. (For a digital archive of applications and teaching tips, see 
the CALL-IS Virtual Software Library, www.diigo.com/user/call_is_vsl.) 
Software like Evernote (evernote.com/) or Microsoft’s OneNote (www.onenote.
com/) offer further ways to archive a student’s trail through their readings across 
digital devices.

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The tenets of communicative language teaching and active, mastery learning are 
supported by a wide range of software and applications. The teacher’s task as 
materials developer in the digital era has become at once simpler and more com-
plex: to find the appropriate applications and to plan for motivating, creative uses 
of them. The digital tools are readily available to assist in this task.