Evaluation of Japanese-English CALL tool supporting contextual language acquisitions

This paper describes and evaluates the Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Tool, which supports contextual language acquisitions. The CALL Tool searches for and retrieves parallel texts, while aligning unedited Japanese-English parallel texts from the World Wide Web [Pershin, Akahori, 2001]. We compared the proposed tool with an existing system by conducting an experiment that showed our system´s effectiveness in phrase acquisition, discourse-structure acquisition and text comprehension. However, this experiment also exposed the drawbacks of the proposed system, such as a poor interface design. We concluded that the proposed system could be used together with existing systems to increase the number of learning strategies available for language learners.