German subordinate clause word order in dialogue-based CALL

We present a dialogue system for exercising the German subordinate clause word order. The pedagogical methodology we adopt is based on focused tasks: the targeted linguistic structure is embedded in a naturalistic scenario, “Making appointments”, in which the structure can be plausibly elicited. We report on the system we built and an experimental methodology which we use in order to investigate whether the computer-based conversational focused task we designed promotes acquisition of the form. Our goal is two-fold: First, learners should improve their overall communicative skills in the task scenario and, second, they should improve their mastery of the structure. In this paper, we present a methodology for evaluating learners' progress on the latter.