Looking Back: Tracing Trends in Canadian CALL

CCALLNET (The Canadian Computer-Assisted Language Learning Network at the PostSecondary Level) was a semi-annual newsletter published from 1987 to 2002 that was distributed to colleagues across Canada who taught languages to university students. Its objective was to create a network of Canadian faculty interested in CALL by informing them about new software developments, CALL conferences, and publications in print or online. This report looks back on the issues of CCALLNET to see what changed over this fourteen-year period. We also take a retrospective look at the three Canadian CALL conferences spawned in part by the newsletter. With the advantage of hindsight, we identify some themes in Canadian CALL activities from the end of the 1980s leading up to the twenty-first century and discuss the effects of circulating a `free', printed newsletter prior to the Internet era.