ABSTRACT
Language instructors are bombarded in professional conversations, conferences and publications with glowing reports and demonstrations of “leading edge,” “new generation,” “must-have” L2 or foreign language software packages. Indeed, with the advent of such interesting and attractive software as A la rencontre de Philippe (Furstenberg, 1994) or Dans un quartier de Paris (Furstenberg, 1999) for French, Berliner Sehen (Crocker & Fendt, n.d.) or Uni-deutsch.de (n.d.) for German, or Ucuchi (Andersen & Daza, 1994) for Quechua, and their ilk, it comes as little surprise that a great deal of discussion, often of a highly technical sort, surrounds these new tools for teaching and learning. A question that many of us in the profession are sometimes reluctant to ask about newer software packages is whether in fact the software has convincingly been shown to fulfill its educational purposes. What do we know about the educational effectiveness of the current generation of multimedia language-learning software? And, underlying that question, how best do we go about finding out?
