Integration Of CALL Into College English Reading Instruction: A New Model And An Empirical Study

In China, researches on CALL have been mushrooming ever since in 1981 when the first Chinese delegation attended WCCE81 and submitted the first CAI thesis to the conference. Rising of the Internet in the 1990s provided CALL with new approach and momentum. How to apply the results of early studies in new condition, and combine the use of courseware with abundant teaching resources and new technology the Internet provides, becomes an important question for CALL researchers. The thesis is just one of the attempts that probe into this area. There are several influential models and theories concerning reading, such as bottom-up, top-down, interactive framework, and schemata theory. With vividness, hyperlink, instant access, and large storage capacity, computers and network provide an ideal carrier to bring the models and theories mentioned above into effect. Furthermore, CALL helps to solve such problems in College English teaching and particularly intensive reading in China as lack of teachers, learners' low interest, and obsolete reading materials and so forth. CALL is the interdiscipline of applied linguistics and computer science. The former provides it with theoretical guidance, and the latter offers technical support. Most of the previous studies on CALL focus on the development of courseware, leaving the combination of CALL courseware with abundant resources on theInternet rarely touched. Therefore, it need to be done to investigate: first, whether the new CALL is significantly superior to traditional teacher-centered instruction; second, if yes, whether significant improvement can be found in terms of learners' writing, vocabulary & Structure, reading comprehension, attitude, interest, and self-efficacy. The paper addresses the aforesaid problems through experiment. Research design and methodology is as follows. Subjects in the study are second-year non-English majors at NUDT. Three classes are chosen randomly: one class as control group, receiving traditional teacher-centered instruction; another as experiment group I, receiving new CALL instruction only (Learners have their lectures in the computer laboratory, learning language points and mastering reading skills from the textbook and relevant resources downloaded from the Internet, holding discussion with each other by local area network), the last group as experiment group II, receiving a combination of the two. The study lasts for eight weeks, and both pre-tests and post-tests are held to investigate the effect of the new CALL on subjects' writing, vocabulary & structure, reading comprehension, attitude, interest, and self-efficacy in English learning.The data obtained are processed with SPSS vlO.O. Result shows that subjects in the experiment groups made statistically significant progress in terms of reading comprehension, attitude, interest, and self-efficacyand that Experiment group II made the greatest improvement. As far as writing and vocabulary & structure are concerned, although no statistically significant difference was found, subjects in experiment groups reaped better results than their counterparts in control group. It can be learned from the study that the new CALL does have positive effect on English learning, solving the problems in traditional teacher-centered instruction such as learners' low interest, less opportunities for communication', and insufficiency of reading material. Meanwhile, traditional instruction has its own advantages and should not be abandoned totally. Based on the findings of the study, attempts are made to explore some issues of integrating CALL into classroom instruction and meanwhile suggestions for future research are provided.