Thoughts on CALL evaluation

This week, our topic was evaluating CALL resources.  The main takeaway, to me at least, is that a CALL resource ought to be evaluated chiefly for how it fits into learning goals/objectives (in other words, appropriateness).  For that reason, I find the Methodological Framework, which focuses on a description of the resource and procedure for using it, and the SLA perspective, which is based on SLA theory and often focuses on specific tasks to be carried out with the resource, the most useful for evaluating CALL resources.  Popular checklists, like those offered by the NFLRC and ICT4LT, are, on the positive side, quick and easy to use, but I find them weak for their overemphasis on basic design/logistic aspects of a resource and sparse on their criteria related to appropriateness and practice.

To illustrate, consider the ICT4LT Website Evaluation Form.  It includes such questions as "Does the site contain links to other useful sites?" and "How easy is it to navigate the site?  Can you easily get back to the site homepage?", which I find to be either irrelevant and/or so basic that they ought to be a given and not significant factor for evaluating how useful a CALL site might be for a given teaching situation.  There is little on the checklist related to instruction or learners, and nothing related to theories of language learning or ESL approaches.  With so many potential CALL resources out there on the web, and the advance in web design, Web 2.0 functionality, and general reliability of mainstream websites, I feel that CALL evaluation must go beyond basic design and logistic elements and focus much more heavily on theories of SLA and ESL approaches.  A site like Duolingo, for example, would get quite a lot of "yes" answers on the ICT4LT Website Evaluation Form, but I would think that most language teaching situations would be hard pressed to justify making the site a significant part of their syllabus.