I have just returned from participating in a conference on "Computers in Applied Linguistics" held at Iowa State University. During the five day conference many uses of computers in studying and learning language (and languages) were demonstrated by attendees from the U.S. and a number of other countries. I wanted to comment on one of the many applications I saw because I think it represents in several ways an exemplary use of computing in Higher Education.

The leading buzzword at the Conference was MULTIMEDIA (no surprise) and many applications -- many from commercial software developers -- made state-of-the-art use of graphics, audio and video. One was a well- known program for teaching English as a second language which featured laserdisc or MPEG digital video (your choice), multiple branching options to clips, dual sound tracks, snazzy screen design, computer adaptive testing techniques for student language level placement, multiple pathways to destinations, etc. Nice stuff -- if you can afford it -- but this was not the program which impressed me. Rather it was a program developed by Rick de Graaff (Amsterdam) for teaching intermediate Spanish. The features of Rick's program, called "Asi Funciona"? Multimedia pyrotechnics? Splashy graphics? Dazzling color? None of that: it runs under DOS (not Windows) and doesn't even require a color monitor. No pictures, no digital sound or video. What makes the program effective are rather sound pedagogical thinking and (Dutch?) common sense. The features I would highlight in how the program is put together are, to my mind, ones that we should all keep in mind in developing and evaluating courseware for Higher Ed:

1. Adaptability to a variety of learning styles
2. Transfer of responsibility for finding appropriate learning strategy to the student
3. Using a pedagogical approach based on basic principals of learning in the field
4. Meshing the program tightly with local curriculum realties and needs
5. Using the program as a research instrument as well as a learning tool

A few comments on each item in light of Rick's program:

1. ADAPTABILITY. Rick's program requires students to fill in open-ended responses to dialogues and passages in Spanish. Upon completing a task, the response is not simply right or wrong, but rather the student is given a "Feedback Menu" which offers a variety of help options, including "Try again", "Multiple choice", "Example", "Explanation", access to a hypertext grammar or to an on-line Spanish dictionary. Deductive or inductive learners, good or bad keyboarders, on-task or off-task learners, all are accommodated by being able to choose the kind of feedback the program offers.

2. STUDENT RESPONSIBILITY. I think we sometimes loose sight of the fact that in Higher Ed we're dealing with adult learners and that we can and should make use of their intelligence as well as of the (inferior) intelli- gence of the computer. Rick's program lets students share in developing appropriate learning strategies -- they can try out the different options and see what works best for them.

3. MEETING LOCAL NEEDS. Rick's program was designed to complement the materials presented in his intermediate Spanish class. It uses the same basic vocabulary as the textbook uses and expands on some of the situations introduced in the text. An exemplary application like "A la rencontre de Philippe" (Yale University Press) is great, but instructors still have to ask (and figure out themselves): how do I fit it into what I have to teach next week? Rick's hypertext grammar and Spanish lexicon are not exhaustive: they are targeted specifically at the intermediate Spanish learner.

4. PRINCIPLED PEDAGOGY. How did Rick approach constructing his program? See what gee-whiz stuff is out there and figure out how to design a program around it? His approach was to think about what his students needed and to study what second language acquisition theory has shown about how students learn foreign languages. Some of the basic lessons Rick used: There is no one way to learn a foreign language (Think that's obvious? Consider the pendulum swings in FL pedagogy over the last 20 years and the accompanying fanatical proselytizing). Another: adults learn differently from children and we shouldn't teach a second language in the same way that a first language is learned (obvious, too?).

5. RESEARCH TOOL. This is a great by-product if you can manage it, but of course it's not everyone's cup of tea. Rick is using his program to collect data on what features the students tend to use as well as using different control groups (program users and non-users) to study the program's effectiveness. Is he doing this to build a case he can submit to his administration to get more computers? No, he's interested in how the language learning process works and in how we can go about helping students do it better. Maybe he'll include the results in his doctoral dissertation. He is in fact a graduate student and he wrote "Asi Funciona" while working on his Masters (no IBM/Annenberg/NEH, or even Phillips, money). Low budget, high effectiveness.

Lessons as I see them:

• If you do your own program, you can adapt it to your own needs so as to offer a very close programmatic fit. Commercial software is great -- we have a lot of it in our Lab (including good stuff like "Systeme-D", "LinguaROM" and "Excito") -- but it will only take you so far. As a Department Chair, I find myself continually trying to convince colleagues of the advantage of going beyond packaged goods. Rick's program illustrates that things don't need to be big scale/big budget to be effective.

• You don't have to have all the bells and whistles to make an application pedagogically effective. I'm not anti-multimedia. My own presentation at the Conference was on integrating digital video into hypertext applications. But if we get too distracted by the glitz, we'll lose our way. Besides we can never compete with Nintendo.

One last bit of irony. The full title of the Conference was "Computers in Applied Linguistics: A Decade of Commitment". I'm not sure what it tells us that for my money the best program demonstrated at this celebration of a decade of progress was one which comfortably runs on the original IBM PC of a decade ago. Rick, by the way, says that the program runs best on a 286, but that it doesn't really need all that power.