Abstract

Problem Statement:  In a search of available literature, there wasn’t any articles found that are related to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) on content analysis or citation analysis. This reveals that there was a research gap for citation analysis in the field of CALL. Therefore, there’s a necessity for citation analysis in the field of CALL to examine the trends of analysis, research and citation.

Purpose of Study:  The purpose of this study was to examine research and trends in  CALL published in selected professional [1] documents during 1990-2008.

Methods:  Citation analysis was used in this study to investigate documents related to CALL that are indexed by the Web of Science, Scopus EBSCOhost and ScienceDirect.  “Computer-assisted language learning,” “computer-assisted language instruction,” “computer-aided language learning,” “CALL,” “technology-assisted language learning,” etc. were the keywords used in searching for documents. There were a total of 1309 documents analyzed that were judged to be relevant to the field of computer-assisted language learning. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze and report this data.

Findings and Results:  The principal documents related to CALL published in the sources during 1990–2008 were articles and English was the most frequently-used language. The most frequent publishers of documents related to the CALL field were Computer-assisted Language Learning and Language Learning and Technology journals. Interestingly, the number of published documents increased sharply to a high level in 1997, as compared to the previous year. The majority of the source documents which were related to CALL were co-authored. Speech and Learning Systems were the most frequently used keywords. A total of 3536 cited documents were related to CALL during the years 1990-2008 by the authors. The most frequently-cited article topic was “conversation/computer-mediated communication,” and descriptive research was used most frequently in research design.

Conclusions and Recommendations:  The trend line is an increasing trend in the number of articles on CALL starting from the year 2000. It was recommended that a combination of citation analysis and other analysis types should be used in future research studies. It was also recommended that similar studies should be conducted with the journal and should be repeated at least every five years.

Keywords: Computer-assisted language learning, citation analysis, research, trends, h-index