Development of Remedial CALL Materials for Improving English Listening Skills of Japanese College Freshmen

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The present study served the following three purposes : 1) to develop an authoring system which enabled EFL instructors and researchers to create CALL software more efficiently and cost-effectively, 2) to develop pre-intermediate level CALL English material appealing to the interests of Japanese college freshmen, 3) to evaluate the performance of the developed material and the authoring system.As a result of a questionnaire survey given to college students, "daily life in the US" was adopted as the main theme for developing new CALL material. Filming was done in the US in the states of New York, New Jersey, and Alabama where a total of eight hours of natural conversation and interviews were videotaped and 6000 photographs were taken. The Three-Step Auditory Comprehension Approach was adopted as the basic theory in the development of the courseware.The principal specifications of the authoring system are : 1) the courseware is described in Excel files, 2) a converter program converts the Excels files to XML files which are linked to particular audio, video, and still image folders, 3) a series of JavaScript programs present the XML-converted courseware and linked information to the learners using the functions of MS Internet Explorer.The evaluation of the developed CALL material by college students revealed that : 1) the material was rated more difficult than previously developed elementary-level material and easier than pre-developed intermediate-level material, 3) the material appeals to the students' interests as much as the highly-evaluated material previously developed, 4) English skills of the college students measured by TOEIC score improved 56.2 points by the use of the material for four months. The usability of the authoring system was evaluated by developing other CALL material using the system which showed that it enables us to reduce 90% of the time and expense for creating CALL software.