O n f e r e n c e

Challenge 
Impact 
Response 
Remoteness, location 
Difficulty in establishing 
relationships 
to 
enable 
collaborative discussions 
Participants 
had 
lower 
levels 
of 
access 
to 
resources 
generally 
assumed to be available in 
Western culture 
Researcher relocated to 
Derby, WA for two years 
Funding 
for 
technical 
resources 
Participants’ unfamiliarity 
with CALL 
Difficult for participants to 
engage in discussion 
Production of prototype 
based on ESL programs 
but with Nyikina content

---

-26- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Different epistemologies 
–
resources, time, meetings, 
home work 
Researcher seen as 
outsider expert with 
resources (car, 
technology, housing, etc) 
which reduced 
engagement
Workshops with few 
participants 
Create and occupy the 
Third Space (Bhabha, 
1990; Durie, 2005; 
Nakata, 2007) 
Two different language 
ecologies - oral vs written. 
Established pronunciation 
vs established grammars 
and orthographies 
No research discoverable 
–
to be investigated in study 
Lack of successful 
precede
nts in others’ 
research 
No process to follow, but 
some to avoid (Rau & 
Florey, 2008; Ward, 2001, 
2013) 
Incorporate findings in 
draft Design Principles 
The DBR problem identified was how were we going to get an appropriate CALL program 
based on existing ESL models of traditional (CALL) software 
–
i.e. what would the process 
be?
The major issue for CALL researchers here is the difference in language ecologies. CALL 
has been researched and practised in CSL, especially English. These languages have 
written grammars, orthographies and pronunciation systems that have been established 
and refined over centuries. The linguistic features can be used by teachers and learners 
who are familiar with the metalanguage and generally literate in their first language.
However, IL are mostly unwritten languages with established and known pronunciation, 
but with linguistic features only recently described by Western linguists, in Western 
languages. Language documentation of this type is often not accessible to speakers and 
learners of IL such as Nyikina. Traditional CALL instructional design and pedagogy draws 
heavily on linguistic characteristics but they are unfamiliar to speakers of oral languages.
In addition, there has been little research on the learning of an oral language as a second 
or additional language other than by pre-literate children, and so this problem was 
accepted as one to be investigated in the course of the study.