Abstract:Abstract: Concerning foreign language teaching practice, the successful application of a certain CALL technology, to some extent, depends much on the acceptance of its users, i.e., foreign language learners. In order to explore the factors of new technology acceptance for foreign language learners and the interrelations among those factors in the internet context, this study sought for exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modelling with a questionnaire to investigate non-English majors (n=191) who used automated writing evaluation (AWE) system. The results indicated that, 1) four factors were obtained: perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived uniqueness as well as behavioral intention, among which, perceived uniqueness was a newly constructed factor in this study; and 2) the interrelations among factors were: perceived uniqueness, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness worked as the impetus, intermediate and determinant factor for behavioral intention, respectively. The aforementioned results provided some heuristics for CALL, namely, decision-makers should make effort to distinguish the functions of new CALL technologies; educational software producers should endeavor to satisfy learners’ individualized needs; and educators should try to foster learners’ information literacy.
Key words: foreign language learners; CALL; technology acceptance model; information literacy; automated writing evaluation (AWE)