I recently attended EuroCALL 2014 in Groningen, The Netherlands. EuroCALL is a great reference point for observing trends in CALL research in Europe. The EC has massive educational research grants (competitive, of course), and there are many large-scale CALL research projects involving multiple countries. While it feels somewhat surreal from a Japanese perspective, it is also overwhelming in some respects.

I wonder if CALL research tends to experience trends a bit later than those in Educational Technology. Open Education, such as MOOCs and LOOCs, was popular. Also, gaming has been promoted to its own section. In Educational Technology, when MOOCs are discussed, they are often linked with Big Data and paired with Learning Analytics. However, at EuroCALL, the focus was on course delivery in collaboration with universities across multiple countries, with discussions centering on management methods and effectiveness. Explaining the CEFR levels of participants as an attribute is something I would expect from a CALL-related international conference. As for language education, I believe it was last year that CALICO featured a special issue on Design-based research (or perhaps it was a book).

More than that, one thing that surprised me was the thought: is the same situation happening at EuroCALL as in Japan? I listened to the keynote speech by Carol Chapelle, a leading expert in CALL research, and a presentation by Professor Colpaert from the University of Antwerp, who is famous for his research on CALL system design, and honestly, I was surprised. This was because the talks were about research methodology and the foundations of Educational Technology. These are topics that graduate students in Educational Technology would likely learn in their first year of a master’s program. The meaning of viewing education and learning systematically, quantitative and qualitative research methods, background theories, evaluation methods, and so on… I felt a bit uncomfortable having these topics covered in a keynote.

Of course, the papers published in top-tier CALL journals like Language Learning & Technology, CALL, and ReCALL are excellent, but it made me wonder if the development of research capabilities is not progressing properly even in Europe. Now, as for how to advance CALL-related research… no, rather than CALL, I believe it can be handled with research methodology in Educational Technology plus knowledge of the domain being studied. This would include academic fields related to human cognitive functions involved in education and learning, psychology, quantitative and qualitative research methods, basic statistics, and ICT-related knowledge. It would also be beneficial to have supplementary skills in literature searching, academic writing, and English.

Older papers—the ones I read when I was a master’s or doctoral student, perhaps from the 1970s or 80s—were very interesting and highly informative. I fear that as educational research has come to place more weight on practice, the ability to “conduct research” is being neglected. I am not saying that conducting practical research is bad. I believe this is a very important type of research. However, I see a trend where people are swept away by the word “practice” rather than “practical research,” failing to learn methods for educational research (or perhaps they have learned them but are not utilizing them), setting aside hypothesis formulation based on theory and reviews of previous research, and simply collecting data, performing descriptive statistics, and calling it a day. There are students and faculty who easily write that “no such research has been conducted,” but since a great deal of research on education and learning has already been done, it is very rare to find research that has not been done at all. At the very least, there is likely related research, or it may have been done in other subjects (there is no reason not to review research conducted in other fields from similar perspectives). This trend might not be limited to CALL, but could be occurring across the entire field of educational research.

Listening to the presentations at EuroCALL 2014, I felt that sense of crisis. It served as a reminder to myself, and I felt a renewed sense of determination that I must strictly and thoroughly foster the research capabilities of my graduate students. Starting this October, I will be accepting a research student who wants to study English learning × ICT. I intend to keep monitoring the trends in CALL research in Europe.