CALL And English Teaching In Middle Schools

CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) is an important program that has been studying by the teaching staff in the last few years. On the basis of the research of the scientists and scholars in this or relevant fields, this paper explores the CALL'S development and its theoretical foundation, makes a further research for how to use CALL in middle schools, and offers guidance for the teachers to carry out English teaching with CALL in theory and practice.CALL is an activity in which computer is used as an assistance to help the English teacher carry out the teaching and research work. It is part of CAI (Computer-Assisted Instruction). The research of CAI began at the end of 1950's, and it was limited by technical conditions at that time, so the effect was not ideal, but it showed good prospects. During 1960's-1970's, CAI was particularly introduced to the universities in America. It was not until 1980's-1990's that CAI had developed to a deep direction due to the matured technology of multi-media and network. Especially in 2000's, the development of the broadband network has offered a much wider universe for CALL with the network as a center.The learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism and constructivism have established theoretical foundation for the use of computer in teaching. CAI theories have also gone through 3 periods with the learning theories, i.e. behaviorism CAI, cognitivism CAI, and constructivism CAI. CALL also has had all the previous experience in the development, i.e. behaviorism CALL, communicative CALL and integrative CALL. The three stages are correspondent to the development of the learning theories and CAI theories.Although the traditional teaching approaches have done much contribution to the education course, its defects have appeared with the advancement of the modern science and technology. At the same time, CAI begins to show its advantage for individual study. Therefore using CALL to assist English teaching is the need of the era as well as the education itself. In order to meet these needs Ministry of Education P.R.C has been working on the project "Net to Each School" since 2000. On the other hand, it began another project to train some leading English teachers inprimary and middle schools in national degree. In such classes, one of the most important subjects is computer. Both of the programs have laid a base for the use of CALL in middle schools either in hardware or in software.In spite of the favorable conditions, CALL is not used widely because of some reasons. One of them is that the teachers there are lack of CALL theories or practices. So the writer tries to give them some basic teaching principles in using CALL. i.e. purpose , combination with the traditional teaching methods, students as a main part and teachers as the dominant. The hardware environments for CALL can be divided into three types: multi-media classroom with only one computer, multi-media language lab, and network classroom. Teaching approaches of CALL should vary under different environments. From the functions, methods and standards of evaluating the courseware, the paper tries to give some advice to the English teachers in middle schools for how to choose the courseware they need. According to construction system, the courseware can be divided into 4 different types: frame type, automatic generation type, database type and AI (Artificial Intelligence) type. According to the using purpose, it can be divided into individual instruction type, drill & exercise type, question & answer type, simulated game type and problem-solving type. According to the developing and running environment, it can be divided into courseware for detached machine and that for network. The paper also discusses how to make a courseware from the aspects of the overall schedule, script composition, material preparation, programming, test & package and etc.. At last the paper provides some useful links for English teachers in middle schools from the views of teaching resource, English medium, corpus, literature a...