WorldCALL is an international association for teachers and educators interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

Representatives of 37 different countries participated in the 5th WorldCALL Congress – the first one in Latin-America – at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. The Language Coordination Center (CODI) of the Vice-rectorate for Undergraduate Affairs of the Universidad de La Frontera presented a study that describes the perception and attitude of UFRO students towards educative videos for local development in the English learning process.

The coordinator of the Language Coordination Center at the UFRO, Margot Godoy, affirmed that one of the big issues for the majority of universities in Latin-America are the drop-outs and student retention regarding English courses within their training process. “We mentioned in our presentation that, among other topics, at the Universidad de La Frontera we have been able to reduce the demotivation of our students regarding the learning of the English language, since we were able to get to know their needs and interests in a study carried out in 2014. That’s how we achieved to innovate our way of teaching languages at the UFRO. We created a mini-unit for the creation of teaching material, in which we prepare educative videos for local development with the aim of confronting the students at CODI with realistic resources or situations.”

“Our participation in this congress can be seen as part of the internationalization strategy of the university. Therefore, it was important to show our work, which also seemed to be attractive for several other universities, and besides, we generated a lot of networks. At the same time, while listening to other presentations, we noticed that the Universidad de La Frontera is on a world level regarding technology integration.”

Margot Godoy specified that she made her presentation together with Olusiji Lasekan, a teacher at CODI, and emphasized that they also participated in the launch of the Latin-American WorldCALL, what makes them founding members of this Latin-American