Archived versions

http://web.archive.org/web/20001018141339/http://www.history-of-call.org/ (archived versions)

I assembled the following before finding http://www.ict4lt.org/en/History_of_CALL.pdf which is the full article.

So, here it is, the first (as far as we know, and we should know!) Illustrated History of Computer Assisted Language Learning, what is shown here is our new Dreamweaver version, it duplicates what was shown

on 31 May at CALICO 2000 in A1 Poster format (840mm x 600 mm).

What you are about to see is the "backbone" of a future larger Academic History, which we hope to build gradually, subject to funding. We also hope to release a CD-ROM with a lot more resources. There remain in this initial version some omissions, especially in the 90s, gradually the gaps will be filled, help us do this by telling us where you find these gaps and inaccuracies. We will also mention your name under acknowledgements (unless you tell us NOT to).

This academic history, full of hyperlinks which we will implement gradually will also have quite a number of external contributors, would you like to be among them? If so, see details for external contributors.

At any point, you may return to the Index page by clicking the History of CALL icon and logo in the top right hand corner of every poster, this will enable YOU to view the full history with some 15,000 words and hundreds of graphics. We hope you enjoy reading it, starting with the Introduction.

Philippe 3 October 2000

Writing the history of CALL seemed to be the obvious initiative to take as we approached the end of the millennium, not just because somehow we had to mark the passage of the century, but because the field had acquired a maturity which is often described in the work of the last 10 years. Now that the millennium page is turned, the field resembles, in my personal view, linguistics around the early 70s, a field with a large number of developing branches. Yet the initiative itself was taken for a very practical reason which hits many small scale CALL developers in the academic world, how to retain a key colleague funded from a previous research project and how to utilize fully his graphic skills. Limited funding needed to be obtained quickly, which ruled out conventional grants, and the History of CALL initiative was born thanks to the generous support of the two prime organizations in the field, CALICO and EUROCALL. Support was also quickly obtained from WorldCALL.

The results of this first exhibition are limited by the time scale which a small team had to accommodate, by the difficulty in obtaining some sources, and by the sheer monumental dimension of the task. This is not meant to be any authoritative historical statement, simply an informal gathering of facts and trends about the evolution of our field. The selections made in this first effort reflect my editorial choices and the fact that I am addressing an informed audience.

Many aspects will be changed when version 2 due to be published live in late August 2000 is designed for the general public. Much of what is found in the next 39 posters comes from publications and the WWW. It is indeed obvious that none of this could have happened without the invention of the
world's largest library and network. Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau!

Interestingly, when I started searches on the web, the first link to appear was �A brief history of CALL�, which sadly had nothing to do with Computer Assisted Language Learning and a lot to do with the army, perhaps that was a fitting tribute to the role played by the US military in the development of the field. There will be omissions, there will remain some inaccuracies, which we would like you to correct, and for those, I plead guilty as the primary author and most will be corrected by the time this Exhibition hits Dundee at EUROCALL 2000, but there will also be newly discovered facts at a time when CALL might play an increasing strategic role in enthusing and educating more and more learners to become more multilingual and more multicultural. There will also be a much more serious attempt at building upon our knowledge beyond this exhibition with the larger academic version of the History of CALL which will feature thematic summaries from an increasing list of external contributors. This will also benefit from being indefinitely updateable and linkable given that it will only be shown in the digital medium. If use of the first person is made in this narrative, it is purely because I must bear primary responsibility for any errors or omissions.





Ferdinand De Saussare

Unlike CALL, linguistics, the science of language, does have a genuine prehistory as it goes back at least to Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, so it is hardly surprising that early CALL projects adopted their names. Modern linguistics, however, has its roots in 19th century philology, a word which subsists in languages such as Spanish to be virtually synonimous with linguistics. Philology in the narrow sense concerned itself with the study of the origin of language and its evolution over time, especially since the discovery of Indo European. Variations on philology were also found in the terms historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics as described by the father of structuralism, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who was among those who opposed it to synchonic linguistics, the study of the contemporary use of language. The suffix -ics implies scientific rigor and indeed, linguistics has grown to become very rigorous and a parent or model science within the humanities. Following hard on the heels of De Saussure, linguistics developed between the two world wars a European and an Anglo-American tradition, building increasingly closer links with a number of other "human" or social sciences such as Anthropology (Levy-Strauss), Psychology (post Freud and Jung) to name just a couple. Perhaps the most prominent pre-war European school of linguistics was the Prague School still going strong and alive on the web.

The French representative of the Prague School was the famous Andr� Martinet who sadly passed away last year after doing a lot of good to the cause of language learning in modern Europe. One of the American structuralists, Kenneth Pike, a well-known anthropolinguist, also wrote in the first serious journal in CALL, the celebrated SYSTEM (1979, Vol7, No 2).

Pike receives a tribute on the SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) Web Site. Timelines on the evolution on linguistics are surprisingly few and far between, at least on the web, ranging from those which go right back to 3000 years BC such as the English Language Timeline kept at Brigham Young University to one covering the birth and growth of Transformational Generative Syntax and its derivatives. Post Chomkyan linguistics showed even greater diversity with a new

linguistic theory springing up at near weekly frequency. After 7 years of study of linguistics, first in France in the European tradition, then in London, in the Anglo-American tradition, I had personally been exposed to more than 10 such speculative frameworks of investigation, including the lesser known stratificational linguistics and the London-based Daughter Dependency Grammar (Hudson).
There is little doubt that work in many of the branches of linguistics, a description of which would exceed this Exhibition by a ratio of 10 to 1 (400 posters!), has influenced CALL, notably applied linguistics and didactics, psycholinguistics and Second Language Acquisition, computational linguistics and formal linguistics. A good approachable summary of linguistics in general is found on the impressive web site YourDictionary.com to which we direct the reader for much more detailed info. It is fair to say perhaps that psychology now has a major influence on formal linguistic investigation, which has in fact turned round the symbiotic relationship between the two sciences.

At the beginning of the century, Linguistics tended to lend much of its methodology to Psychology, now the rigor of psycholinguistic investigations impacts well both on Linguistics as a whole and CALL research. The eternal debate between innateness (Chomsky, Pinker) and behavorial reinforcement popularized by Skinner remains, and it is doubtful that Neurolinguistics or single variable isolation will resolve it in the foreseeable future.

The aims of language learning have changed over time. Whereas in the past, learning a language was seen as an intellectual challenge (Latin, the traditional Grammar Translation Approach), in the present climate, there is a greater emphasis on learning language as a practical skill and/or as a tool for other purposes (business for instance). At the beginning of the twentieth century, as structuralism was becoming defined, the first machine designed to teach language was invented.

In 1924, the Drum Tutor was born. Around the time Claude Shannon (1937) was formulating his Information Theory which was to have some influence on structural linguistics, the term "Applied Linguistics" was used for the first time, in the USA.

Skinner's book "The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching" was published in 1954, 3 years before Lado's influential book "Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers" (1957).

Contrary to what is generally known, the founder of Behaviorism was not Skinner but John B. Watson in 1925. It is, however, Skinner's application of behaviorism to learning which was to have a lasting influence on the use of machines in education and the vogue for Audio Language Laboratories. As stated in the previous poster, 1957 was also the year of the publication of "Syntactic Structures" by Noam Chomsky.

Claude Shannon

John B. Watson?

Audiolingualism peaked in the 1960s. In 1961, the first language laboratory was established in an educational institution in the UK. The Audiolingual Approach based on behaviorism and structuralism emphasized the spoken rather than the written form and presented the learner with a carefully graded series of "conditioning and habit-forming modes of learning".
In 1963, C. Gastagno published "The silent way".

In 1966, the TESOL association was formed. In 1968, Rivers published "Teaching foreign language skills". The book blended prevalent audiolingual theory with a new "cognitive" approach which was beginning to assert itself.

It was at the beginning of the 70s that the "communicative approach was born". This is generally attributed to Hymes (1972) who defined "communicative competence" as opposed to Chomskyan "linguistic competence", although Wilkins in 1971 also proposed a functional and communicative approach to language learning. Wilkins was also responsible for "Notional Syllabuses" some five years later (1976).
A year later, Asher's Total Physical Response approach was born (1977). What all these approaches have in common is the emphasis which they place on learner involvement in functional and transactional situations. More influential publications followed which sealed the prevalence of the "communicative approach".
They included:

1978 Teaching Language as Communication (Widdowson) Communicative Syllabus Design (Munby)

1979 The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching (Brumfit & Johnson)

Simultaneously, a number of other approaches appeared such as the Direct Method which allowed students to perceive meaning directly through the target language by-passing translation. Grammar was learned inductively rather than taught explicitly. Materials used in learning needed to be authentic and meaning negotiated from context. Over the last few decades, linguists and pedagogues have developed language teaching methods which focus primarily on teaching communicative competence: the ability to communicate effectively with other speakers in the real world taking into account the context of the conversation.

The Situational Approach attempted to predict, grade and teach language in the framework of situational contexts.
The Natural Approach was characterized by its primary concern with meaning (Richards and Rogers - 1992). Theoretically based on the second language acquisition approach developed by perhaps the most well-known researcher in Second Language Acquisition today, Krashen, it is very similar to Communicative Language Teaching. Stephen D. Krashen's SLA theory first appeared in 1982 and had a great deal of appeal in the language learning establishment. Krashen has since published around 100 books and his approach has four separate components. He and others are also responsible for the useful distinction between Learning (a conscious and explicit process) as opposed to Acquisition (a sub-conscious, automatic and implicit process).

The most important element of Krashen's theory is the stress put on the availability of comprehensible input. It further devalues the importance of grammar with the teacher's role being to "generate a constant flow of language input in context which enables the learner to comprehend the message".

The Whole Language approach was based on the idea that "babies acquire language through actually using it, not through practising its separate parts".

Stephen D. Krashen

Recent years (1991), however, have witnessed a return to form with Nunan, and given the growing emphasis on needs analysis, individual learner's characteristics and paths, learning styles, and generally learner-centered methods, a balance between function and form is being achieved. This is important to CALL which was often criticized for advocating the worst excesses of behaviorism or for an emphasis largely on form.

We are told now that individual students should be at the center of any curriculum, not an add-on to a pre-determined set of goals. Learners must be able to make mistakes to learn to use a language effectively and students should be "provided with a safe secure environment in which making mistakes, taking risks or simply not knowing are accepted as natural aspects of learning" (Ridley, 1990).

Humanistic approaches like Gattegno's Silent Way and Lozanov's Suggestopaedia subordinate teaching to learning and, like Asher's Total Physical Response method, they share this idea that stress inhibits language learning and that errors are productive.

It is also important to realize, as Selinker (1972) points out, that students develop their own "interlanguage" and, if this is the case, then it would seem to follow that students learn best when their learning is customized as far as possible to their needs.

In the past, methods have tended to be specialized and exclusive in technique, banishing what preceded to the scrapheap of failed technology. However it is now generally believed that successful language learning involves competence in a large number of complex and integrated skills and that successful language teaching is more likely to result from using a combination of several different language teaching approaches as no single approach can be said to be entirely successful on its own.

There are now many SLA researchers involved in CALL, so many that one of the most vibrant Special Interest Groups of CALICO is SLAT (Second Language Acquisition and Technology). Among prominent names in this branch of CALL are Nina Garrett and Carol Chapelle. Prof. Chapelle's LLT article "CALL in the year 2000, in search of research paradigms" (1997) , very aptly summarizes the relationship between SLA and CALL and is probably responsible for the fact that Carol will be a Keynote Speaker at 3 CALL conferences in Europe this year, including the closing keynote at EUROCALL 2000, where a "popular" version of this Exhibition will be shown for the second time. There is also a symbiotic relationship between rigorous research in SLA and CALL, and indeed CALL offers SLA researchers the possibility of new challenges in the examination of language learning as a whole and, in particular, under conditions of partial or total autonomy. We are probably not far from the time when a new SLA approach or theory will be formulated which fully encompasses digital language learning.

Index 7-11 not available.

12.

The period of WW2 was obviously not as buoyant in Europe but pioneering developments were to take place in the United States in particular with Vannevar Bush and the invention of "Memex". The period is described below in chronological order.

1940 - On January 8th, the first demonstration of a communication of data
at a distance between New York and Hanover is achieved by Stibitz and

Williams at the American Mathematical Society in the presence of Norbert Wiener and John Von Neuman. Telematics is born before the computer. Vannevar Bush founds the N.D.R.C. (National Defense Research Committee), his goal is to co-ordinate different aspects of research in the field. John Vincent Atanasoff and one of his students construct

the binary electronic calculator ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).

1941 - On April 10th, Bush publishes a brief paper : "Memoranding regarding Memex", in which he describes the target audience for his plans.

13.

The post-war period is marked by some very important developments which were to pave the ground for the modern computer. The illustrated timeline is shown below.

1950 The magnetic band of the BINAC : Eckert and Mauchly use some re-writeable
bands.
Development of the military network SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment)
ancestor of NORAD, TACS, SACS...
Whirlwind at MIT, the first major CAI project: it employed some seventy engineers
and technicians and was the first computer project to use magnetic core memory and
interactive display screens.
In Great Britain, J.E.L. Farradane proposes a theory of classifications (relational indexation).

1951 Hardware : Development of the UNIVAC: a fast printer.
Remington Buffer Memory : it is the interface between the central processing unit and the peripherals.
The UNIVAC 1 (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) is sold (Eckert and Mauchly).

14.

Levy (1997) quotes Stern (1983: 169) describing this period as characterized by "pedagogically audiolingualism, psychologically behaviorism, linguistically structuralism".

This poster covers the entire period of the evolution of PLATO from the early 60s to the present day.

 1960 PLATO, (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), a five million dollar project was apparently started by Don Bitzer, a Professor of Electrical Engineering. The mainframe system was designed to deliver learning packages to a large number of students. It already included a communication system in the form of note files which could be used for liaison between tutor and learner, between learner groups and for Bulletin Board type announcements. The tracking facilities of PLATO were also impressive. Curtin was among the first teachers to use PLATO for language teaching. Her group designed a program to help translate Russian into English.

15.

1960 First prototype of documentary server (MIT): project TIP (Technical Information Project),
the first time that one could navigate through a bibliographic database (Eugene Garfield).

1961 Network and the Internet: Paul Baran, from the RAND Corporation, develops the idea
of "Packet switching network" in "On Distributed Communications Networks". This was the
first network model in military communication.

1963 Douglas Engelbart publishes his paper "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect", this is the beginning of project H-LAM/T (Human using Language, Artifacts, and Methodology, in which he is Trained), which will become NLS (oN-Line System).

 The word "Hypertext" is created by Ted Nelson, who prefers it to "Linktext", "Jumptext" or "Zapwrite", although it will not enter the public domain until 1965. The Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series defines hypertext as: "Text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders; specially text and graphics ... which are interconnected in such a way that a reader of the material (as displayed at a computer terminal, etc.) can discontinue reading one document at certain points in order to consult other related matter.

Ted Nelson
16.

Ahmad et al (1985: 28) state that "The late 60s and early 70s are of particular historical importance to CALL."

1965 The word "Hypertext" is official. Ted Nelson presents at the Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Start of the Stanford Language Project: It is not entirely clear from the literature whether Patrick Suppes, who is often associated with this project, did in fact start it. Ahmad et al (1985:28) clearly state that the work was carried out under the supervision of Van Campen in the Slavic Languages Department." The project used a teletype linked to an audio tape recorder.

This pioneering system was replaced in time with a bilingual Visual Display Unit or VDU and a computer-generated audio system. "Although the first newsletter was not printed until Spring of 1966, apparently an organizational meeting for the National Association of Language Lab Directors was held in 1965, possibly in Chicago". Extract from IALL Web Site (International Association for Language Laboratories).

"NALLD changed its name ? to IALL, International Association for Learning Labs (and later changed it again to International Association for Language Learning Technology)".
17. –
18.

1970 First electronic conferencing system DELPHI Development of memory chip by Intel.
1971 Ray Tomlinson invents the program e-mail for distributed network.
Intel introduces the world's first microprocessor, the 4004,
invented in 1969 by Ted Hoff, S. Mazor and F. Fagin. (Byte, 1990).
David Merrill will develop Component Display Theory from his
participation in the TICCIT Project (see separate poster on TICCIT,
which stands for Time-shared, Interactive, Computer Controlled
Information Television). Merrill led the Project and is responsible for
many outstanding achievements in instructional technology for which
he has received awards and honors. CDT ultimately developed into Elaboration Theory and more recently into Instructional Transaction Theory, described by Merrill's current research team at Utah State University as ?an instructional design theory designed to enable the development of intelligent computer-based instructional design tools?.
CDT was applied to CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) in all kinds of disciplines. Its premises are that the learning goals , instruction and evaluation should be consistent.

19.

1975 Altair 8800, Zilog Z80, MOS 6502, Motorola 6800 microprocessors.
Altair microcomputer kit (based on 8080): This was the first microcomputer using BASIC.

Cecil Wood, and Gerhard Clausing publish ?The computer-tutor in media-aided language programs.? in the NALLD- Journal 8, 3: 11-20.

BIP- basic instruction program is born.
Until the mid-1970s most computers had a restricted character set of upper case letters.

1976 Wilkins publishes ?Notional Syllabuses?.
Apple Computer is formed, release of Apple I (6502-based).
Texas instruments announces the TMS9000,
the first 16-bit microprocessor.
Control data corporation markets the PLATO system as a
commercial product.
Release of Commodore PET (6502), Apple II (6502) and
Radio Shack TRS-80 (Z-80).
Birth of Total Physical Response method and the Natural Approach.
The norm X25 is adopted by the CCITT. It will become an universal norm.

Apple II computer

20.

1978 TRANSPAC (Transmission par Paquets) by the DGT : first high speed communication network in France.
MicroPro announce the first word processor on a microcomputer,
WordMaster, precursor to Wordstar.  

Apple and Radio Shack announce 51/4 inch floppy disc drives.

Widdowson releases ?Teaching Language as Communication? and Munby
releases Communicative Syllabus Design.
Weischedel, Ralph M., Wilfried M. Voge, and Mark James publish
?An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Language Instruction.?
In Artificial Intelligence 10: 225-42
Plato passes to the intelligent terminal.

The 1st NALL journal

A 5 1/4 inch floppy disc
21.

The historical timeline has been contributed by Harold Hendricks from Brigham Young University. Discussion of TICCIT includes quotes from Mike Levy (1997) and Randall Jones (1995).
The co-principal investigator of the TICCIT project and mastermind of many of the concepts is Dr. C. Victor Bunderson.  
1967: The development of a computer-assisted instructional system combining the recently developed "mini-computer" with television technology is begun by the MITRE corporation. This system is called Time-shared, Interactive, Computer-Controlled Educational Television or TICCET, and promises to deliver large amounts of individually controlled instructional material to as many as 300 users.

July 1971: MITRE demonstrates the first interactive television system, now known as TICCIT (Time-shared, Interactive, Computer-Controlled, Information Television) in Reston, VA. In their expanded vision, TICCIT is now a community service as well as an educational tool.

 Interactive Television system : TICCIT