When I first read through the Hubbard article the first section to give me pause was when he discussed the dominance of vocabulary instruction in CALL. He states that it wasn't so much state of the art teaching but instead that programmers found it easy to put them in computer programs. Here I was thinking that there was some kind of educational pedagogy behind what was included in language learning computer programs just to find out that some of it was added for face value with little thought to best learning practices. He does give credence to the fact that knowing vocabulary is inherently beneficial though. Levy puts more emphasis on vocabulary, noting the sheer size of the task of understanding vocabulary. I have always encouraged expanding vocabulary but in incremental steps. There is no need to know all the words if you struggle putting a single sentence together.
During my last teaching job I became familiar with Rosetta Stone. My students used it for the first hour of class. While there were many good things about Rosetta Stone there were some frustrating aspects as well. My students really liked the self paced aspect and the ability to go back and do a lesson again. They liked the different aspects of the learning process (speaking, listening, writing and reading). Many of them were really good at one or two of those but were deficient at the others. It gave them a chance to work on the things they felt they needed. Some of the down sides were that many times the student would speak words of phrases and the software would not accept it as correct. I would be there listening and found what they said was acceptable and understandable but the program would not pass them. Other times the passed lessons would not save so the students would have to do them again. That was really frustrating for them. Even so they liked using the computers and Rosetta Stone. It was a change of pace for them and gave them a chance to feel success learning a new language.
