For over a decade, the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has steadily incorporated both instructional technology and diverse teaching models in order to meet the demand for Spanish within the undergraduate curriculum. The challenge has been to do so without increasing cost and still maintain or improve learning outcomes. The result is a curriculum that offers a wide variety of models for the effective delivery of instruction.

Since its inception as The Spanish Project in 1998, the implementation of a blended (face-to-face and online) format to deliver instruction in beginning and intermediate Spanish language courses has allowed the department to meet enrollment demand without increasing instructional cost while still maintaining or improving learning outcomes. 

Robert Blake. Univ. of California, Davis

What CALL offers for the L2 Curriculum:

Robert Blake will summarize the best features of both tutorial CALL and social computing (i.e. synchronous CMC) with an eye to illustrating how technology can enhance the L2 curriculum. He will also analyze how language play and language games can embody sound learning principles that motivate students to learn. Games are “designed experiences,” where the participants enjoy the freedom to fail with low risks, to experiment, to fashion new identities, to exert varying degrees of effort, and to interpret. Language games let players be producers, not just consumers by promoting agency, control, and ownership. He will also give some idea of both the human and institutional difficulties implied by efforts to incorporate new technologies into a language program whether in enhanced, hybrid, or totally online learning environments.