Toward an ontological approach in goal-oriented language courseware design and its implications for technology-independent content structuring

The term ‘design’ is being understood more and more as a methodological process, together with its acceptance as the result of such a process. As a process, it is a stage in the courseware engineering life cycle which primarily focuses on rendering the development process more effective and on enhancing the qualities of the finished system, especially its linguistic-didactic functionalities. More importantly for CALL as a discipline, the design process should be research-based and research-oriented; it should integrate accepted findings, principles and methodologies on the one hand, and it should also generate new research findings which can lead to new working hypotheses, on the other. In this article we will focus on two essential design aspects: concept and content. We will show how both concept and content can remain independent from any technology so that they become as reusable, exchangeable, and sustainable as possible. The key activity is specification. The ontological approach in specification states that what can be specified can be developed. This working hypothesis does not depend on technology but on a sound conceptualisation of what is needed in a particular learning situation. As far as content is concerned, an intermediate level of content structuring in relational databases facilitates a rapid output to different or successive learning environments.