O n f e r e n c e

Collaborative iterations 
These are iterations of the process which resulted in sequential instances of a CALL 
program. 
 
Challenge 
Impact 
Response 
Lack of technical skills, 
establishing a ‘team’
Costs prohibitive 
Do it ourselves with 
minimal technology, 
capacity building 
Evaluation 
–
direct 
questioning, survey, etc 
not appropriate way to 
give and receive 
information 
How then to get data?
My observations and 
recordings about how 
people were engaged 
Oral data 
Previous experience with 
linguists, academics 
Outsider language workers 
not listening or recording 
cultural language
Time, listening, being a 
resource, collaboration 
My unfamiliarity with 
language 
Difficult to comprehend 
pedagogical needs of 
language and therefore to 
design activities 
Researcher worked with 
speakers in oral mode and 
linguist in CSL mode to 
learn language and 
linguistic features 

---

-28- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Language
I couldn’t communicate 
well with speakers to get 
content (Aboriginal 
English) 
Work with intermediaries 
who have language in 
common 
Participation 
Theoretical basis was 
situated design and 
participatory (Cárdenas-
Claros & Gruba, 2009) or 
user (Carr-Chellman, 
2007) design, and DBR 
itself couldn’t be achieved 
without participation 
Time, building 
relationships, fishing, 
yarning, workshops on 
country 
Number of active speakers 
- only one available to do 
all the work 
Stress on speaker to do all 
work; no work if speaker 
indisposed 
No cohort of active 
speakers for learners to 
experience authentic 
learning activities (Ozverir 
& Herrington, 2011)
Used some existing 
resources as compiled by 
linguists 
No synchronous activities 
possible 
Cultural representations 
Existing stock images not 
appropriate to culture 
Time, skills, equipment, 
distance, costs 
Bought cameras and 
laptops for participants 
Oral language - CALL 
pedagogy for written 
languages i.e. Western 
approach to CALL 
pedagogy 
–
SLA and 
linguistic features 
underlying 
Not relevant to oral 
language because of 
reliance on linguistic 
features and literacy
Work on new pedagogy 
starting with oral work, 
not literacy assumptions 
like alphabet, orthography, 
vocabulary, wordlists 
Started with oral language 
recordings and worked 
backwards in design 
Speech recognition needs 
to be developed 
Collecting data
Couldn’t use interviews, 
questionnaires, surveys as 
these are culturally 
inappropriate ways of 
collecting information.
Reliance on yarning, 
conversations, design 
artefacts, photos of 
whiteboards, etc. and 
memory >> journal 
No specific data points in 
the cycles
There are two challenges addressed here. Firstly is that of collecting and recording data 
in this context, where interviews, direct questioning and surveys are an inappropriate 
way of obtaining information; where filming workshops or yarning (Bessarab & Ng'andu, 
2010), conversation (Kovach, 2010) and just hanging around are the only ways of 
collecting data in a valid way.

---

-29- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
Secondly, the need for a new pedagogy which could be operationalised in a CALL 
program, and which respected the oral-ness of the language and the way it has been 
taught and learned for millennia. In this case, we worked backwards from the spoken 
recordings and in some cases never actually made complete or accurate transcriptions or 
translations. The outcome is a call for a rethinking of the pedagogy in CALL for oral 
languages, and a need for development of speech recognition services to incorporate in 
the programs. 
Refine design Principles