COO Spaans

Two CALL programs for Spanish as a second language are reviewed and their practical applications are compared and discussed. Cuanto Antes is a typical drill-and-practice program, designed and edited by an individual teacher for additional practice in the normal language classroom. It aims at training vocabulary in context. For this purpose the program is simple and effective, but possibilities for explicit feedback more than just right/wrong evaluation are very limited. La Conexión Española is a complete language course for communicative business purposes. The program on laserdisc contains video fragments with or without subtitles, vocabulary, grammatical and functional explanation, and some additional oral and written activities. But although these kind of multimedia programs can be very useful for creating a communicative learning environment, student-student and student-teacher interaction remains essential for real language acquisition.