Some titles, let's say a grammar or writing reference, might strike some educators as being not much different from a textbook. It might even offer the same exercises from the structuralist's or behaviorist's playbook. Even so, the computer provides the better medium:
Stimulation. No text can match the graphical potential of the computer display. Most texts are printed in black only, or perhaps with one ("spot") color in a range of hues. Printers charge per color: the fewer, the cheaper the job. Not so the computer monitor, which deals in millions of colors (16.7 million, reportedly). And while most programs use "interactive" as a marketing buzzword more than a design criterion, they do stimulate and engage students in ways that textbooks can't.
Multimedia. Software can incorporate audio, video, and animated graphics to supplement textual information where the textbook must make text and graphics alone suffice.
Internet extension. Software can provide links within to external resources, such as publishers' companion sites, which offer updated and expanded resources as well as learner communities.
Feedback. Textbooks offer feedback in the form of an answer key at the back of the book, which usually doesn't go beyond confirmation of correct or incorrect. Software can offer it immediately, embedded in response to each incorrect or correct answer and include links to internal or external reference material. Moreover, the type of feedback is far more useful to the learner as it may be explanatory, diagnostic, or elaborative, providing far more information than simply confirmation of right or wrong.
Yet, some critical positions on educational software seem to compare what a particular software title offers not to a comparable book but to what a teacher could offer a student. Tutorial CALL software occupies a place somewhere between human instruction and a textbook. It needs to be assessed in its place on this continuum and not with the poles.
Guidance. A learner studying on his own with a tutorial CALL program, outside of an educational setting, lacks some critical support that a teacher with CALL experience could provide:
Software selection. An experienced CALL teacher is in a much better position to assess the pedagogical value of a piece of software than an independent learner, who may be, for the most part, at the mercy of wildly unrealistic marketing hype as his only source of information about the program. This is especially treacherous when navigating the waters of retail programs marketed to individuals, as opposed to more elaborate systems marketed to institutions. With the former, the company need only concern itself with making each individual sale, not with satisfying the more rigorous quality criteria of an informed institutional client with wide purchase decision-making responsibility.
Orientation. A teacher can introduce a student to the functionality and resources of a program, explain its goals, demonstrate its procedures, and perhaps warn against some pedagogically unsound or confusing parts, all with the objective of maximizing the program's language teaching potential.
Direction. An experienced language teacher can assess each student's specific needs and recommend a custom study plan for the use of software, rather than leaving a learner to stumble through the program in haphazard fashion or even work through it in a linear fashion, which may not be an effective use of his time.
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