English language teaching methodology in a call classroom: Testing and evaluating traditional grammar instruction

Abstract

Pursuant to the revised Research Policy issued by the Executive Committee of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning, research in the area of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), should guide language pedagogies rather than the availability of new technologies and functionalities. Accordingly, the aim of this research was to test a combination of methods and techniques rooted in traditional grammar instruction by alternating them in a conventional classroom setting (based on paper and a whiteboard) and an experimental CALL setting. The hypothesis was that if the classroom activities were anchored in traditional grammar teaching methodology, the CALL environment would prove as comprehensive as the conventional classroom, thus stimulating and yielding positive results. By means of grammar-based teaching and communicative learning the grammar item 'meaning of modal verbs' was taught. Based on a quasi-experiment and the principles of a repeated measures research design, the performance of 50 students at two English language departments was alternatively measured in both the conventional and the experimental classroom settings in several subsequent instances. The analysis of the data resulted in the conclusion that the overall performance of the participants in the experimental setting exceeded the performance in the conventional setting.

Keywords

• computer-assisted language learning
• English language teaching
• teaching methodology
• traditional grammar instruction