Clicking for Help

Abstract

This study investigates context-sensitive help access in The E-Tutor, a web-based CALL program for L2 German. In fall 2011, we collected data from 198 beginner learners of German who worked on four different activity types for which the system provided a context-sensitive help link on the most commonly made error unique to each exercise. To determine the most common error, a learner corpus of 5000 previous users of The E-Tutor was constructed and statistical analyses were applied. Study results indicate that learners’ help access varies according to activity type with the most specific and relevant link being accessed most frequently. Moreover, our log data indicates a fairly limited use of the help options by our learners thus confirming previous research results.