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Typical CALL programs present a stimulus to which the learner must respond. The stimulus may be presented in any combination of text, still images, sound, and motion video. The learner responds by typing at the keyboard, pointing and clicking with the mouse, or speaking into a microphone. The computer offers feedback, indicating whether the learner’s response is right or wrong and, in the more sophisticated CALL programs, attempting to analyse the learner’s response and to pinpoint errors. Branching to help and remedial activities is a common feature of CALL programs.
Wida Software (London, UK) was one of the first specialist businesses to develop CALL programs for microcomputers in the early 1980s. Typical software of the first generation of CALL included Wida's "Matchmaster" (where students have to match two sentence halves or anything else that belongs together); "Choicemaster" (the classic multiple-choice test format); "Gapmaster" (for gapped texts); "Textmixer" (which jumbles lines within a poem or sentences within a paragraph); "Wordstore" (a learner's own private vocabulary database, complete with a definition and an example sentence in which the word to be learned is used in a context);
Another specialist business, Camsoft (Maidenhead, UK), has enjoyed similar success with its "Fun with Texts" authoring package, which was first produced in 1985 and is now available in an updated multimedia version: http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk Other CALL activities in the early days of computer use in schools included working with generic packages such as word-processors, which revolutionised text production assignments by enabling language learners to continually revise and have [[peer review]]ed what they are writing before printing out the final version of their composition.
Current CALL software has embraced CD-ROM and DVD technology, and there is growing interest in Web-based CALL (see Felix 2001).
==Pedagogical and methodological considerations==
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