• Organisation

Language instructors are bombarded in professional conversations, conferences and publications with glowing reports and demonstrations of "leading edge", "new generation", "must-have" second or foreign language software packages. Indeed, with the advent of such interesting and attractive software as A la rencontre de Philippe or Dans un quartier de Paris for French, Berliner Sehen or Pilot for German, or Ucuchi for Quechua, and their ilk, it comes as little surprise that a great deal of discussion, often of a highly technical sort, surrounds these new tools for teaching and learning. A question that many of us in the profession are sometimes reluctant to ask about newer software packages is whether in fact the software has convincingly been shown to fulfill its educational purposes. What do we know about the educational effectiveness of the current generation of multimedia language learning software? And, underlying that question, how best do we go about finding out? The present paper makes a modest claim. The authors - all working as language instructors/researchers in school and university settings and sometime designer-developers of language software - argue that a new approach is needed to the educational evaluation of language learning software that falls under the rubric "new media" or "multimedia" as distinct from previous generations of CALL software. The paper discusses the case for such a new approach by arguing that present approaches to the evaluation of CALL software, while reasonably adequate (although not wholly, we note) for earlier generations of CALL programs, are not appropriate for what we show to be a new genre of CALL software distinguished by its shared assumptions about language learning and teaching as well as by its technical design. We conclude by sketching a research-based program of what we term "E/Valuation" that aims to assist language educators to answer questions about the educational effectiveness of recent multimedia language learning software. We suggest that this needs to take into account not only the nature of the new media and its potential to promote language learning in novel ways, but also current professional knowledge about language learning and teaching.