Departing from a well proven concept for an English curriculum at the School of Telecommunications Engineering at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences and Technologies, the challenge to move 50% of the course online to better address the needs of its part-time students seemed to be a feasible if a difficult task. The first attempt in 1999 was passable but highly frustrating as too much time and energy had been invested into producing online materials without utilising the new medium to its full potential.

The underlying principle for our approach now is blended learning or in other words using as many approaches as useful to cater for the different needs and abilities of our learners. This is reflected in the following pillars of our concept i) a well-balanced combination of physical and online sessions ii) a task-based approach that draws on the expertise of our mature learners in their own fields iii) a multi-channel approach in online learning blending synchronous and asynchronous communication integrating all four skills (see figure below)

iv) a constructivist approach in shifting responsibility for a large part of the learning outcome to the learners themselves.

We believe that the success factor for our concept hinges on the specific combination of different modes of learning recognising a wide range of learner strategies and the vital need for learner interaction both with the instructor as well as other learners. Learners present their achievements over the semester in an online portfolio they may design themselves. This includes their learner profile, the peer-reviews and their reflections on the individual assignments and their overall progress.

This presentation looks at the development online language learning materials in an English course for beginners at the Language Centre, University of Padova. The course integrates classroom lessons with use of a Web-based learning environment. As is the case in many Italian universities, high enrollment figures and the large number of working students mean that not all students attend courses. The presentation, then, will focus on how computer-based learning activities can play a valuable and necessary role in the facilitation of autonomous language learning in contexts where students work without the presence of an online tutor. Particular attention will be paid to the design, choices and theory behind the various types of feedback in the course. Forms of feedback such as prompts for reflection, reinforcement of student response, guidance, explanations, corrections, substitutions, scores and access to recorded responses and results, will be proposed as alternatives to the traditional and often inadequate "right/wrong" type of computer response.

The exercises are created by language teachers and the presentation will look at how their classroom experience influences the nature of the feedback. Feedback is also developed according to students' results and incorrect responses (recorded in the Learning Management System, Lotus LearningSpace) to provide appropriate content and achieve beneficial levels of student-computer interactivity. Students' reactions to the different kinds of feedback will also be considered.

This presentation introduces the Developing Independent Language Learning (DILL) programme at the University of Salford. It evaluates student and staff attitude and behaviour towards DILL and the lessons learned during its pilot year. DILL was introduced in September 2002 with all first year modern foreign language students.

Research has shown that many students fail to make effective use of resources available in Language Centres. Furthermore, they lack the strategies required to work on their own. However, the level of successful use can be increased by teaching specific skills aimed at developing learners’ ability to learn independently. DILL builds upon ideas and materials developed for the taught DILL module on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) programmes of study. In addition, involvement in the SMILE project has raised awareness of the value of language advising in the modern foreign language sector.

DILL uses the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to provide a progressive programme for individual task-based learning of strategies for independent planning and learning, including a framework for learner reflection, and pointers to practice language-specific materials in the multi-media Language Resource Centre. The VLE Discussion Boards are used as a vehicle for student interaction about learning, additionally, with staff moderation, they are used for general language advising. DILL is integrated into language programmes and Personal and Academic Tutors will give formal assessment of progress as shown in a portfolio of work and reflections on learning.

Writing skills and cognitive skills are of prime importance to academic success. Good practices in argumentative writing, standard structures and coherent style are however hard to teach. Online Writing Centres at various universities offer solace in various languages, yet concentrate primarily on providing suggestions and correct samples. Students still need to consult lecturers and resources like libraries and manuals to achieve anything like the standard set.

This paper report on the research carried out to test the effectiveness of feedback tools like www.worldwidewriting.com on the quality of student work in assignments. The study was carried out at various faculties in various languages by staff from Nijmegen University and the University of Professional Education of Arnhem & Nijmegen.

After an introduction to the study, the presentation will focus on didactical issues for the teaching of writing skills using keywords like collaboration, action-based learning, project-based learning and student-based teaching to discuss some best practices. The session will be run on an informal basis and the presenters will welcome audience participation, or indeed, feedback.

The project team has selected some of the best methods for teaching communicative skills in the less taught languages in technical colleges. The methods are: Computer assisted language learning in context, Simulations, The Physical-Emotional and Cultural approach (PhyEmoC), Task Based Teaching, and Tandem Learning.

The project team will develop sets of materials and instructions for exemplary lessons for each method. The materials will be ready for use in Basque, Danish, Dutch, Gaelic, Romanian, English, German, and Spanish. To assist and inspire language teachers the use of the methods and materials will be demonstrated through instructional video recordings of exemplary lessons.

The final products will contain:
§ A DVD video library with commented recordings of the methods used in classes.
§ A manual with method descriptions, instructions and ready to copy and use materials.
§ A website containing all the developed materials for download, i.e. manual, lesson materials, videos and also a communication centre with discussion areas where teachers can comment and share advice on the different methods and also share materials and propose new methods and ideas.

The products are Copyleft (a copyright notice that permits unrestricted redistribution and modification, provided that all copies and derivatives retain the same permissions).

This demonstration will give a brief overview of the project and present the video, software, manual and exemplary lesson developed for “Computer assisted language learning in context”. For more information please visit the project website www.languages.dk/methods

The course I am teaching now focuses on Web applications and how to integrate these into teacher education and TEFL. The core element of the course is task-based learning. The course is for in-service teachers of English. They explore and get familiar with different resources on the Web by doing tasks and evaluating websites with regard to how these might be ‘exploited’ for their classroom use. The end of semester project incorporates different aspects of the resources that were discussed therefore constructionist principles are embedded into the learning process. Students must develop skills to become functionally, academically, critically and electronically literate. The methodology course described focuses mainly on critical literacy as students learn to evaluate the validity and reliability of information sources and electronic literacy as they become able “to select and use electronic tools for communication, research and autonomous learning” (Shetzer 1998).

I have started to use Nicenet - a collaborative online environment - to give in-service teachers a forum to collaborate and share ideas about how to adapt different technology tools and learning material to a particular level and learning situation. I have made use of the following functions of Nicenet: threaded conferencing, link sharing and posting documents. Through Nicenet students can work independently and they can interact with each other in addition to the classroom setting (the class meets in person every week for 90 min).

Automatic recognition of words is one of the key skills of good readers. Reading inevitably depends on perception or visual efficiencies of readers. We investigated the word recognition speed of visually impaired college students who studied English as a foreign language to develop assistive software of English learning compensating for their visual problems. The subjects have difficulties in visual acuity and also in their visual field. Compared with good readers we found two types of slow readers in our subjects. Good readers with normal vision and one type of low vision group (LV1) can read words in almost the same time period independent of their length. The rates of lps (letters per second) increased linearly with word length. The lps of the other type of low vision (LV2), however, were constant. This means that their reading time of individual words increases according to the length of words. Reading is stressful and painful work especially for the latter type of low vision students. Then we have developed reading support software called readKON equipped with a speech synthesis device.

The main features of readKON are as follows;(1) It can be customized according to individual needs. (2) A speech synthesizer should read by a reader (manual operation to allow them to control the speed). (3) Learners can see their progress looking at the changing rate of their reading speed. The readKON was tested for the two groups of low vision readers. LV1 improved their reading speed by vocal support of the device. For LV 2 it is more useful for word recognition training. The time of decoding each word shortened, and the number of words they read accurately increased. The results show that the readKON is applicable to English learning of any type of slow readers with visual impairments.

An emphasis on the French-speaking editorial space leads one to notice that Information and Communication Technologies applied to Teaching (ICTT) constitutes an excellent means of learning and speaking French. Indeed, ICTT helps people to use French considered in their countries as a foreign language more effectively and to take advantage of French literacy training developed elsewhere, without moving from their places of residence. Besides the ICTT introduces new forms of socialisation to the French-speaking community as it reinforces knowledge exchange between people who are physically dispersed. The spread of websites created to support French learning is important and requires paying much more attention to content. Thus we propose in this paper to analyse and evaluate the existing FLE (Français Langue Etrangère) websites.

Taking into account common pedagogic principles, the paper gives answers to the following questions: How are the FLE websites created? What are their effective uses? What are the main constraints and advantages of these websites French-speaking learners? This analysis permits us to establish a first typology of the main Internet sites for FLE presented as follows:
· Training centres;
· Editors;
· Educational websites and resources directories;
· Courses and products for FLE online learning.

Then, the paper draws up a matrix model of the best content representative of FLE sites according to selective criteria such as usability, relevance and effectiveness. The paper puts great emphasis on comprehension questions and the role of metaphors. It recommends paying more attention to surveying learners’ needs and taking into account the cultural variety of the French-speaking world. Further commitment to the provision of FLE websites is required to meet learners’ needs too.

This presentation will explain the trajectory of the system in the context of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Spanish schools and elsewhere. A new version has been developed, free to all, of this powerful tool, and some outstanding exemplars have been created by teachers themselves, and some of these will be shown. The wide range of possible routines (MCQs, T/F, Crossword, Hangman, Matching, and many more, as well as a completely open-ended framework for branching activities) will be demonstrated, and attention will be given to the way any activity template is open to the simple insertion of media elements with a number of interactions possible for each one.

The emergence of XML as a Web-based standard adds importance to MALTED for the future, and brings closer the reality of relatively easy creation of highly interactive, individualised Web-based routines which offer a pedagogic quality virtually unrestricted by technical constraints.

It is also intended to hold a MALTED workshop at EuroCall for those interested.

We will, on the basis of the evidence presented, seek to draw conclusions about the level of acceptance among students towards the use of computer technology in their language learning experience and make suggestions about the reduction or elimination of student resistance in the future.

This paper aims to show an online course for assessing and developing lexical competence. It is the result of a previous project, which evaluated the lexical competence of students in their final year of English Philology at the University of Granada and concluded that their level was not only insufficient for the academic requirements of the English Philology degree course, but also fell short of the professional demands that many of our students will need to respond to as would-be English teachers. As a result, the lecturers involved in the project sought and obtained finance to undertake a further study ADELEX - “Assessing and Developing Lexical Competence through the Internet” - which specifically aimed to develop a semi-virtual programme that would improve the vocabulary levels of our students (http://www.ugr.es/~inped/index.htm).

In a short and intensive programme, we have developed activities to expand word knowledge, collocations and lexical phrases and encourage the use of dictionary look-up, linguistic corpora and other linguistic resources on the Web. This year we have launched a completely online course by making use of WebCT (Web Course Tools). It is hoped that this might also serve as a model for other linguistic fields (grammar, reading etc) and other educational levels (secondary, postgraduate etc) and, ultimately, become an option for other degree programmes. This virtual course was carried out as pilot study covering the academic year 2001-2002 and was short-listed for the first prize and subsequently received official recognition by the University of X.

The temptation to take educational technology to the next level is very seductive. This road, however, is fraught with hazards which can easily be avoided. This paper will discuss many of the common pitfalls found when dealing with technology and how to take appropriate advantage of technology and technologists. While it is rare for a technologist to preach a 'less is more' ideal, this paper will address the compromises required to produce effectively in education.

To demonstrate this, the presenters will outline a process of the interaction of an educator and technologist as they collaborate on the technological augmentation of a group exercise in syntactic and semantic critique and revision for an ESL class. The demonstration will be mindful of the potentials for failure, burnout, unexpected success, and the possibility of the educator becoming swept up and lost in technology, as well as the technologist overlooking the pedagogical goals. The presenters will also give guidance to the self-starter on how to go it alone and still achieve outcomes that are useful, cost-effective, timely, recyclable and long lasting.

IDC students receive e-mail accounts upon registration. They develop their computer and digital literacy skills during their first year of study. Throughout their BA program, they study Communication Skills in English and their digital literacy skills are enhanced, e.g. by learning how to evaluate Web materials. In the first semester of English, the focus is mainly on reading comprehension skills/strategies and the writing of summaries and e-mail messages. Afterwards, writing requirements become ever more complex (e.g., all types of letters, CVs and accompanying letters of application, press releases, position papers on controversial issues, research papers, abstracts, book reports and film critiques, culminating in an online student journal edited and controlled by 3rd year students).

Students do almost all of their work on computer and send all written assignments as Word document attachments. The teachers use Microsoft’s Tracking System and students are given a set of correction symbols (e.g., vt indicates that the verb tense is incorrect, ro indicates a Run-On sentence). Students receive grades only after their final revision of each assignment.

This paper will present:
the use of the tracking system and student revision, with sample papers, and student feedback (at the end of the 2nd year) on their perception of the efficacy of the tracking system.

Based on results from several EU Leonardo da Vinci projects, we will focus on the requirement of authenticity. We will discuss the pros and cons of multimedia and internet in this respect, and will demonstrate a time/cost-effective tool and procedure for the production and customisation of online multimedia language learning modules based on authentic material from public and proprietary sources.

Special attention will be given to our 'American Interviews', a series of video clips covering different walks of life from horseback riding and ranching to dress making, local politics and commercial life. We will demonstrate how

The learning evaluation of our approach is embedded in the American Cultural Studies programme at a German university. We will present and discuss the main evaluation results and will conclude by showing how the approach can be transferred to other content and study areas.

The 'new' world of learning and teaching languages was never so rich with (technological) opportunities as it is now. They range from opportunities for self-organised learning with multimedia and Web-based contents to eLearning through the use of conferencing systems, discussion forums, tandem chat, email partnerships and the like. No doubt, recent developments within the fields of multimedia and internet offer a fascinating potential for teaching and learning.

Why is it then that teaching practice has so far been reluctant to adopt multimedia and Web-based technologies? Why is it that the language CD ROM market is problematic and eLearning remains hardly more than a buzzword in many language training departments and institutions?
We believe that the key to success lies in integrating the old and new ways of learning within a comprehensive approach of 'Blended Learning'. The pedagogic strengths of the new media can only be fully exploited when successfully combined with each other and with tried and tested traditional methods. Thus, in our 'Blended Learning' approach, CD ROM materials and Web-based contents and eLearning activities are used by local study groups to supplement and strengthen the direct contact between teachers and learners.

In our presentation, we discuss pedagogic principles, concepts and scenarios of 'Blended Language Learning', using practical examples and case studies. Moreover, we look at relevant multimedia/Web content and tools, eLearning activities and technological infrastructures. Emphasis is on realistic (and affordable) solutions that can be seamlessly integrated in existing learning and teaching approaches (in schools, universities and adult education) and can be expanded step by step. The technological basis for our approach is an online 'LanguageStudio' with an expandable and flexible range of options: ready-made learning modules with database connection and feedback options, tools for fast and easy authoring and Web-upload of additional materials (e.g. by tutors for their specific learner groups), facilities for tutorial guidance and online communication.

This paper reports on research in progress into the development of an application to provide learners with real time feedback on their vowel production. This process includes the calculation and plotting of formants (peaks in intensity at certain frequencies) on a graph using the PRAAT programme. The patterns which result are highly reminiscient of the traditional vowel quadrilateral, which in turn reflects articulation, i.e. articulatory changes are reflected on the graph. This application can provide feedback on both pure vowels and diphthongs.

Some of the difficulties and obstacles which as yet prevent it from being a tool which can be used by the learner autonomously will also be outlined and discussed. Foremost amongst which are: the question of speaker normalisation (how to compensate for the difference in values between male, female and pre-pubertal speakers) which may be resolved by way of statistical elaboration of the formant data; and the methods used to isolate the vowel sound from the rest of the signal.

Without any programming, MaxAuthor creates language instruction courseware for 47 languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Native American languages. MaxAuthor is an MS-Windows application. Completed courseware can be delivered over the Internet or MS-Windows and can utilize audio, video, graphics, and exercises such as multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, listening dictation, pronunciation, and audio flash cards. Under the hood, it uses technologies such as Unicode, Java, Perl, Cascading Style Sheets, embedded fonts, and streaming video.

MaxAuthor was used to create the Critical Languages Series of CD ROMs for Brazilian Portuguese, Cantonese, Chinese, Kazakh, Korean, and Turkish (http://clp.arizona.edu/cls).The author records separate audio for both sentences and words and has the option of recording audio in the training language only, but can also record translations or paraphrases in up to 5 other languages or dialects. This presentation will show examples of completed courseware and the process of authoring a simple lesson.

If culture is included in CBI instruction, it is often through authentic texts on current events as related to contemporary target-language society (Klahn 1997; Klee and Tedick 1997). We took this practice one step further and established a goal of deepening the cultural experience by centering only on the theme of French gastronomy. The target-language course includes an historical perspective, descriptions of regional cuisine, cultural festivals, problems in the food industry, menus, food shopping and literary texts. Skills are exercised using theme-appropriate films and music, in-class food tastings, critiques, and interactive Web exercises.

Culturally-prominent themes enmeshed in a country's identity offer noteworthy advantages in L2 learning. First, our case-study ensures a highly-meaningful contextualization and significance with rich L2 input. Second, the continuous recycling of content fosters increasing fluency in that content area. Third, content can be easily manipulated to move students to higher levels of language processing. Finally, choosing high interest themes may revitalize the often-noted lagging motivation of advanced students.

This question presupposes a belief that authentic communication does happen in the Internet. Therefore, I present a case study on virtual travel agencies Web-sites, where I found strong evidence for (1) conversational interaction between user and machine; (2) norm-bound use of terminology and (3) a high level of adequacy between terminology and underlying economic reality. I draw upon three different scientific fields, i.e. discourse analysis in economic discourse (especially sales talk in tourism); terminological analysis of tourism products, and the economics of tourism.

My findings strongly indicate that communicative actions between Web-users and their virtual "partners" follow the norms and conventions of genuine face-to-face dialogue between experts (travel agents) and non-experts (customers). Surprisingly, coherence was found to be the result of the pragmatic outcome of purpose-bound conversation, rather than of author-dependent meaning.

Finally, I propose the design of instructional learning units and of linguistic tools, as a means to operationalise these findings. I emphasis the TOOL FUNCTION and develop the concept, structure and functionality of a terminological database that caters for the needs of the German tourism system and thus provides user-oriented dictionaries and terminology lexica that can be used by students, professionals and translators alike.

But in the real world of distractions, gridlock and opportunity costs, it is difficult to get students in sufficient numbers to gather regularly in a fixed location for a viable class to form.

The online translation course currently being piloted at the Dublin Institute of Technology seeks to minimise this ‘translation loss’ by employing the mid-tech solution of WebCT allied to a novel approach to student feedback. The course is delivered in cycles of three weeks and provides the structure necessary to simulate class discussion. The only fixed time commitment on the student’s part is a synchronous online session once every three weeks.

Colour coded highlighting - readily available within Microsoft WORD, for example - is used to categorise student errors and infelicities according to predetermined (yet flexible) categories designed to promote a problem-solving approach to the translation process and to train for speed.

Tutor feedback provides not instant solutions, but rather an invitation to reflect on the nature of the problems posed by the student’s target text. The final week of the three week cycle is employed by the students in pair or group work. They discuss their ‘colour corrected’ electronic scripts online within the VLE provided by WebCT. This filters out trivial errors and allows the synchronous session at the end of the final week of the translation cycle to concentrate on the remaining intractable problems.

This methodology need not be restricted to translation, but can be adapted to any discursive task where emphasis is placed on the quality of feedback to the student.

The aim of the paper is to present a research project supported immensely by the above-mentioned technologies. It includes an analysis of language material used in a series of English language textbooks from a syntactic point of view (aspect of one-word adverbial placement), comparison of the results with the British National Corpus, applications for the second/foreign language acquisition process.

The process was broken down into several stages:
The linguistic theories on sentence structure and their conclusions regarding principles of adverbial placement were compared with practical rules and prescriptions used in the investigated textbooks. A high degree of discrepancy between these two sources led to a detailed language material inspection.
A corpus of sentences was created from the textbooks which comprise one-word adverbials. This “textbook” corpus was tested against the British National Corpus.

Corpora findings were confronted with the simplified rules stated in the textbooks. On the basis of application of second/foreign language acquisition theories, these findings served as the basis for evaluating textbook language material and for suggesting certain modifications to make the language acquisition process more effective.

In the future some of these procedures can be used in the classroom so that students can have an opportunity to discover the rules on the basis of the work with authentic language corpora. This research and its applications represent an example of an effective connection between linguistic research and teaching/learning process, interrelated thanks to concordance software.

This paper focuses on the strategies adopted at the Language Resource Centre at the University of Economics and Business Administration to overcome these pitfalls. Data gathered through interviews and feedback questionnaires show that students like the idea of being able to learn a language away from a formal teaching environment. Many among them, however, feel the need for external structure and support to keep their motivation high.

The support provided by the language resouce centre takes several forms. It includes introductory meetings in which students are made aware of the philosophy behind tandem learning and social gatherings in which they meet other tandem partners to exchange experiences (videoclips from these meetings will be shown during the presentation). Moreover, the personnel of the language resource centre contacts students regularly to circulate ideas about activities to do with their tandem partners. E-mail is used in this case instead of the Web because it adds a more personal touch and students have the feeling of being “looked after”.

The structure is provided by means of a Tandem Learning Diary which is designed to help students reflect on their own learning and on how their tandem partners learn. Tandem students using this tool are encouraged to keep a record of their objectives and of their progress. Those who complete their diaries are issued a Certificate of Participation in the Tandem Learning Project to be included in their CVs and/or Portfolios. Data gathered from the analysis of diaries and feedback questionnaires will be presented.
http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/sprachlabor/tandem_en.html

The sample consisted of a control group and an experimental group with university students of English as L2. The control group was trained in a four-hour traditional class where the teacher taught some units communicatively, taken from a well known book, and the students had to listen, speak and write about them. The experimental group was developed in the intelligent class for two hours, where the students had to search for information and organize it creatively so that each of them had to present the information in front of the class for 7 minutes in a two-hour session. They had to speak about a subtopic related to “economic, political and cultural issues in the globalization period” in a two-hour workshop weekly.

The teacher’s duty was to teach and make the students work communicatively in the control group, and to guide and assess the group weekly in the experimental one. Data were taken from pretests and postests applied at the beginning and at the end of the semester, whose results were submitted to statistical tests.

Some online instructors seem to suggest that the dynamics and genre of online interaction and communication provide a generally even playing field for native and non-native (Baumeister et al, 2000). They argue that today’s technology-savvy student is adept at contributing to a discussion thread whether they were born in the US or the UAE. Others point to the fact that differences in language and culture are so ingrained that they play a significant role in any educational context, online study included citing evidence of information density in text (Becker, 1988) and complexities of interpersonal relations (Kawachi, 2000).

Approaching the issue from the direction of both language and culture and based on an extensive literature study and interviews with online tutors and students, this paper will seek to detail the main issues in the debate in order to bring a sense of clarity. It is expected that the findings will have ramifications for the way we teach and support international students in English-medium online educational contexts.

This paper presents the results of a research project involving students of French at Masters level, who are given the opportunity to improve a short text which they have written in French by using concordancing software to consult a small specialised corpus of texts by native speakers on a similar subject. The experiment focuses not on morphological and syntactical accuracy, but on vocabulary, style and register. The paper also considers issues relating to the creation of an appropriate small corpus and the importance of giving detailed guidelines to the students.

From these discussions, it appears obvious that interactive computer-assisted learning holds much potential in enhancing learners' cognitive and metacognitive processing. Though interactive aids in various forms are not uncommon among CD ROM-based learning materials, little has been done to harness this potential in network-based language teaching practice, particularly in non-English foreign language instruction. There may be two reasons for this. First, popular and commonly available authoring programmes for Web exercises do not as yet provide sufficient support for the inclusion of interactive aids. Second, thus far hardly any notable empirical work has been carried out to ascertain the effects of interactive computer- or network-based language learning on the metacognition of learners.

This paper will describe the background, methodology and results of a qualitative empirical study in Singapore on the effects of interactive online learning aids on the metacognition of beginning learners performing a networked multimedia exercise for German as a Foreign Language. It will further discuss the implications of this study for the design of network-based tasks and exercises and for future research.

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

The proposed presentation will describe a curriculum development project carried out by the German language faculty at the National University of Singapore which seeks to marry the specific advantages of a computer network with that of multimedia technologies. The objective of the "Movie Studio" project was to create a motivating network-based platform for the production of dialogues in simulated situations, in written and in spoken form. Much like e-cards, which are fast gaining popularity among Internet users, the 'DIY' movies created by the learners can be viewed by designated viewers who will be informed by e-mails.

The presenter will show that, in this project, the design of this application and its technical realisation were very much driven by educational and second language acquisition theories rather than technology per se. The presentation will also include a demonstration of the application's various functions (e.g. creating the context by selecting settings and characters, writing dialogues, and recording these using streaming technology), the learning support available to learners and possiblities for its integration in the language curriculum.

Cited Literature
Chun, D. & Plass, J. (2000). Networked multimedia environments for second language acquisition. In R. Kern & M. Warschauer. (eds.), Network-based language teaching: concepts and practice (pp. 151-170). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

It was our contention that a well-designed Web-based language learning environment would allow learners to actively and thoughtfully manipulate elements in the program as well as to engage in meaningful interaction, rather than having learners passively read through information. We were also not interested in “testing for comprehension” kind of mechanisms prevailed in many commercial language learning programs, because we believed in an active and reflective language learning process. Thus, we specified the following goals for the project:
· Exposing learners to authentic language input
· Teaching the skill of summarizing and paraphrasing
· Helping learners acquire new vocabulary items
· Helping learner understand and enjoy the culture and humor

Considering students taking the Introduction to Linguistics course, we also specified goals for them as:
· Providing learners with an opportunity for limited and controlled linguistic analysis
· Training student to use linguistic terms actively.

Achieving these goals required that the research team to investigate how the available technology and accessible technical know-how could best accommodate our understanding of language learning and teaching. In this presentation, the audience will see a working prototype, a detailed explanation of the design rationale, and results from a usability test in which learner expectations and strategies are discussed.

Ongoing research in DNA and chromosome decoding, music and software plagiarism, OCR and information retrieval requires sophisticated algorithms for exact or approximate string matching, such as the Boyer-Moore algorithm (Charras & Lecroq 1997). But also in the field of text plagiarism detection, fast and accurate routines are needed. The Cerberus program (Decoo 2002), developed by DIDASCALIA and freely downloadable, is based on a straightforward but powerful routine. This routine has since been refined with a view to develop a useful routine for answer evaluation and dictation correction.

The objectives of this new routine are threefold: a/ to identify the longest common cluster between two strings or texts, b/ to clearly show the differences between them (missing characters, redundant characters, different characters) and c/ to allow objective grading of the students’ texts or responses. Requirements for the routine are: accuracy, scalability, accessibility and execution speed. Major problems during development were the specific redundancy of natural language, the possible repetition of text clusters, and, in the case of answer evaluation, interaction design.

XML Web Services within the .NET framework enable us to post this routine on the Web as a function, which can be called by any Windows or Web application written in any language as long as the specification is being respected. The function has to be called with two strings as parameters and the returned string is the result of the comparison.

Our next challenge is to observe how teachers and developers react when effective string comparison routines become more and more available.

References
CHARRAS, Christian & Thierry LECROQ. Exact String Matching Algorithms,
http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/, 1997, visited January 2003.

DECOO, Wilfried. Crisis on Campus: Confronting Academic Misconduct. MIT
Press, 1997.

Three resources will be showcased: Web streaming media, audio/video editing, and DVD authoring. Streaming technology is employed for live and on-demand broadcasts involving a variety of speaking and writing activities. Digitally editing A/V materials makes possible the synchronization of alternate sound tracks with original motion video, providing among others opportunities for practicing pronunciation and intonation patterns in context. The production of a DVD as part of a course project in Business German simulates real-life tasks, assigning students distinct responsibilities that require collaboration at all stages. In most physical CALL environments, the respective hardware and software resources are available to instructors, accessible to students, and affordable to administrators. An example is the free iMovie software that is used for A/V editing and is easy to learn. With the exception of A/V synchronization, the digital tool applications to be demonstrated represent work that is in progress at the time of this writing.

Previous research revealed that most of the teachers did not have enough knowledge to deal with computer technology. It was then decided to make the first module (How do I learn about Applied Linguistics through Distance Learning?) a compulsory one as it deals with applied linguistics using technology as a pretext to provide the adequate input. This module was piloted and results are available in a recent electronic publication, Contijoch et al (2001).

The objective of this paper is to share how the pedagogical design of the Diploma was conceived in close collaboration with a multidisciplinary team to develop the instructional design. It is important to mention that Mexico being a developing country, public funds are restricted, which adds an extra challenge to the development of the project considering that we are aiming to a first class quality educational site. During this paper presentation results of some of the relevant research that has been found after piloting three modules will be shown.

References
Contijoch, M. C., Delgado, M. E., Gilbón, D. M., Martineck, L., Signoret, A.
Torrealva, N. (2001). Estudio piloto de un curso en línea para profesores de
lenguas. Revista Digital UNAM. Vol. 2. No.4. ISSN: 1607-6079

The Web-based materials deal specifically with the development of lexical and grammatical awareness and its application within a task-based format. The materials are text-based and the objective for the student is to demonstrate understanding and mastery of target language and structures within a creative goal-based task.

For the teacher, the challenge is to construct a robust framework in which the student is both supported and guided towards a flexible model of autonomous learning using new technologies both as a medium and a resource. The pedagogical role of the materials is to both reinforce what is done in the classroom and guide the learner towards independent investigation, and creative application of the target language and structures. This integrated learning model is constructed around a set of pathways. In interacting with the materials via the learning pathways the student moves through the different stages of the learning process. While improved linguistic competence is the principal goal, the student is also engaged in a process of learning how to move to independent and purposeful exploitation of resources: in brief, learning how to learn.

The use of specially-designed computer software for the analysis of language corpora facilitates the identification of frequent word combinations in a register. One of the most salient cases among word combinations is that of lexical bundles, which are sequences of three or more words that frequently co-occur in a register. The most frequent lexical bundles in academic prose, for example, are expressions such as as a result of, at the end of the, the extent to which, in the case of, and on the other hand, among others. Most lexical bundles are not structurally complete, and many of them extend across structural units (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999).

This paper will focus on the teaching of lexical bundles to students taking discipline-specific writing courses at university levels. The presentation will include a rationale for teaching lexical bundles, an explanation of the role of special software and corpus-based techniques for identifying bundles in discipline-specific prose, examples of instructional techniques used in writing-intensive classes, and suggestions for how the teaching of lexical bundles can be used to promote more efficient reading and writing.

This paper looks at the effects of culture and learning style on the use of discussion lists on a university learning environment (The Virtual Campus).

The aim of the research is to consider whether cultural assumptions about the role of the learner and the teacher will affect the nature and content of the students’ contributions and participation. Comparisons will be made between Chinese and Swedish learners, among others. Messages will be analysed in terms of content analysis and choice of language; a combination of positivist and interpretive analyses may contribute to this.

The question will be addressed of whether basic assumptions about the construction of knowledge as a collaborative process or an expert delivery may have an effect on the use of discussion lists. An alternative explanation may be that the use of email as a leisure activity has changed expectations about the use of communications technology which have a direct bearing in classroom use or use for self-study.

There will be reference to research on learning style and culture, as well as to the author’s previous research on CMC and culture. Conclusions are tentative at present, but differences in approach to learning and expectations can be found.

Starting from a desire to develop a common format between "Hot Potatoes", "WELTS" (part of the WELL project) and the "Interactive Language Learning" system from London Metropolitan University, we have produced the technology to make such conversion possible. Having worked to develop online teaching materials using one system, there is no reason why users should be bound into that system forever, should they find another system more appropriate for their teaching methodology. Furthermore, given the immense resources required to develop the critical mass of material required to make online CALL relevant to an individual's teaching practice, such a common approach is required to facilitate the pooling of resources. Should a bureaucratic or financial decision in an institution result in a change of software, teachers need to be able to easily convert their legacy material.

This presentation will demonstrate how easy it is to move from one authoring system to another using XML technology, thereby increasing potential accessibility. It will further propose using these developments to create a large pool of exercises for practice and assessment that is independent of the delivery system employed. This will obviate the need for teachers to keep repeating basic language learning material and the presentation will give examples of the expansion of online CALL into more imaginative areas.

The three registers were conversation, academic language and news. The analyses were based on samples collected from the LSWE corpus(Longman Spoken and Written English) using the Monoconc program (Barlow,2000). Chi Square analyses were done between the collected frequencies.

Findings supported the idea that modal meanings are distributed according to respective registers and that differences exist in the distribution of the modal meanings across registers for various grammatical forms of the same modal. Results carry implications for the teaching of modals.

During the classroom sessions, student-teacher interaction is audio taped and the students’ computer moves are stored using a screen capturing software called Camtasia. Immediately after the computer reading sessions, a semi-structured interview protocol is used to collect the students’ views and interpretations of the experience of reading online materials. Operational data are analyzed to identify common trends and differences in students’ working styles and patterns of interaction with the reading materials and comprehension tasks. Verbal reports are analyzed to identify their perceptions of the teacher’s objectives, views of the materials and their self reports on the strategies they used to complete the tasks.

The two data types, computer tracking and verbal reports, provide empirical evidence that the participants in the study overlooked and underused valuable aspects of the design that were intended to provide opportunities for developing reading strategies, facilitating negotiation of meaning and enhancing vocabulary development. The inferences and interpretations emerging from the findings are contrasted with the teachers’ intentions and rationale underlying the design of the activities. Areas of mismatch emerging from the contrast serve as basis of a discussion about the issue of learner choice and teacher control in CALL material design and pedagogy.

The researcher suggests that CALL designers incorporate in the design interface a system of communicating with learners that guides them through the options and helps them exhaust the learning potential of the materials. The researcher concludes the thesis with suggestions and recommendations for CALL design and research. She calls for teacher ownership of the technology in order for her to participate in the design of CALL materials and in exploratory research of their own use of these materials in the classroom. She argues that teacher-generated knowledge about teaching in CALL environments resulting from such endeavor is more likely to point to ways to ease the tension between the teacher intentions and learners’ priorities, and the tension between technologist and pedagogical views of computer use in language education. The researcher also makes suggestions for future research design focusing on “new literacies” and the processes involved in teaching reading comprehension with computers.

The methodology underpinning this attempt emerges from the study of learner differences. If indeed learners learn in a multitude of ways and if their learning can be affected by a variety of potentially unknowable factors, then a deterministic method for the design of online learning environments and their components would not be able to adequately accommodate for these differences. For the purpose of this project, it was decided to open up the field of inquiry and attempt to create a multifaceted, “organic” environment which would be able to provide a variety of self-directed and collaborative opportunities. The qualitative results which can be interpreted from this initial trial (completed with a minimum number of students and resources) should therefore provide valuable information for the design, modification and implementation of future ILE versions and other Web-based language-learning environments.

In order to commence exploring how such a learning context might be achieved, the ILE was developed. This paper looks at the implementation of the ILE in its initial stage and reports upon some of the findings that have emerged from a largely goal-free or interpretative evaluation of the environment. These findings have been gathered over a four-week period and include a large range of areas of interest: from learner profiles and online interaction, to the learners direct response to the environment and its various components. This paper will end with a brief discussion of some of the possible implications of this research for future applications of similar environments.

Reference
Jakobsson, A. 2002. ‘Learning attitudes decisive to students’ cognitive and knowledge development’. 2002 Conference Proceedings, International conference on Computers in Education, Volume II, p.1029.

With considerable support by Tandberg, Inc., this project is enabling CSU campuses to offer synchronous and asynchronous language and cultural instruction between distant campuses drawing upon different faculty and lab manager strengths. This language course, created and offered collaboratively among seven CSU campuses, introduces cultural knowledge in-context through a unique virtual environment designed specifically for this project.

The presentation will describe the process of designing the curriculum and technology to effectively deliver instruction, learner interaction and measured performance, and models new practices in demonstrating how foreign language faculty and language lab managers can collaborate in course development. The technology and selected course materials will also be demonstrated for the audience.

Using “Opus PRO” advanced features and options: e.g. variables, script, etc we are able to insert a score for a single task and a total score for the whole lesson, affix the date and record the time spent on the material, randomize multiple choice questions, set up scrolling text and provide tutorial information. We fully utilize the properties of "input text" -that is a special sort of text - which allows the user to type information or even a short composition, which may then be printed up for the teacher. We have found all these options very useful for maximizing feedback from the teacher and therefore most productive in encouraging learners’ progress in independent work. We have taken into account the disadvantages of using CALL materials in the English Language Laboratory: such as:
§ The amount of waiting time students may face
§ The overwhelming amount of choices that easily distract students
§ The lack of mechanism to access lessons at inappropriate levels

Our goal is to avoid most of these problems in order to make the learning process attractive and user-friendly for students. Thus we produce CAL lessons as a form of computer-based publication that combines text and pictures including multimedia and feedback options. We distribute our CAL lessons in digital CD ROM form, based on the concept of desktop publishing, in order to make lessons easily accessible to the user at any computer. The presentation should be of interest to teachers and developers of CALL/WELL text-based materials.

The narrative data of the present study are drawn from Carter and McCarthy’s book (1997). The extracts are recorded on an accompanying cassette. Carter and McCarthy refer to some features, or some embellishments by the story-teller, such as exaggeration, intensification and amusing details. In addition, Carter et al (1997) claim that oral narratives operate in a different context from that of written forms: attention may have to be attracted, and then kept. Labov (1972) posited a six-part structure for a fully-formed oral narrative: abstract, orientation, complicating actions, resolution, evaluation, and coda.

Several studies investigated important variables related to performance and strategy use in hypertext environments such as text organization, coherence, and reading goal. These studies have revealed relationships among reading goal, text format, and strategies use (Foltz, 1996; Dee-Lucas,1996; Viau and Larivee, 1993). However, current research provides us with contrary findings with regard to whether the reading strategies employed during hypertext reading are essentially different from those involved in reading linear text.

The focus of this study is to compare the strategies used by advanced learners of English while reading a hypertext document and a linearly organized electronic text. Participants were 10 advanced learners of English. A within subjects design was used where participants were asked to read two equivalent texts: one organized hierarchically and the other linearly. Participants were asked to think aloud while reading the text. Their think aloud protocols were recorded and analyzed to generate a list of strategies used. Preliminary results indicate that similar reading strategies were used in both conditions. However, participants also applied navigation strategies in the hypertext condition.

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

The system processes student input by accessing a knowledge base, structured in the form of an extended systemic grammar, and containing, not only a very large number of acceptable variant versions, but also predicted language mistakes. Automatic routines deal with misspellings, minor inaccuracies and omissions of words, while a language mistake calls up an explanatory comment and, but only if the student asks for it, a fuller explanation of the point of grammar or vocabulary in question. In addition, a learner can at any moment interrogate Dominie and be shown a list of all the possible “next words”. Far from making the activity easier, this often presents challenging choices and encourages an investigative, enriching, approach to language learning.

Dominie, which has taken several years to develop (the project was shelved for a time due to programming difficulties), was created as follows. Teachers from seven different countries, contacted at Eurocall, agreed to set the textual material to their students as paper exercises and send the scripts to Faro Systems, which is a small independent partnership located in Scotland. In that way data files could be compiled for Dominie containing variants and predictable mistakes that would be useful in practice to Dutch-, French-, German-, Greek-, Polish-, Russian- and Spanish-speaking learners. These colleagues are now piloting Dominie and reports from them describing ways in which the package can be used will be included in the presentation.

In the context of this work our paper discusses three important elements currently still ill provided for in most online offerings. These are: (1) creating a sense of community, (2) providing opportunities for speaking activities, and (3) including meaningful feedback structures. We present a review of current Intelligent Language Tutoring projects and consider the role of graphics in personalising feedback. We also propose how a sense of community might be created through the use of innovative collaborative projects, using voice applications and discuss the important concepts of social dilemma, learner versus instructor control, time management and authentic assessment which arise in this context.

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

The implementation of the project is being done using distant learning techniques and taking full advantage of all capabilities the Web offers.

The curriculum is structured as to develop the teachers' abilities to use computers in everyday teaching, and to design and evaluate didactic plans that make use of the computer as a tool in actual classroom environments. The collaboration of various partners, including technical experts, has provided the expertise for these targets. The network has been participating in all steps of the development, implementation and evaluation of the training material, in order to establish a standing communication between theory and practice.

There is little evidence that IT environments actually lead to gains in learning (Allum, 2002). In fact, it is always difficult to evaluate what learning goes on in specific periods of training and practising, partly because learning is not a linear, but an “organic” (Nunan, 2000) process. However, we think it is possible to identify and compare some of the characteristics of the learning situations, and possibly learning outcomes, in CALL and non-CALL environments.

In this research, we were interested in finding out the influence of the use of IT and collaborative work on the performance of learners of French as a foreign language (FFL). Our hypothesis was that the use of IT on the one hand, and collaboration on the other hand, would result in varying gains in the quality of the language produced.

We set up an experiment in which learners of FFL were asked to work individually and in pairs, with or without IT, in order to carry out similar communicative tasks in the foreign language. The data collected consisted of both oral and written language. The results will show whether those learners working collaboratively with IT produced richer, more appropriate and syntactically accurate language than those working with conventional materials. Although this limited study does not allow generalizations to be made, suggestions will be made as to the potential of CALL environments for language learning, and for the setting up of larger comparative studies of this type.

Our study aims at demonstrating how new electronic literacies provide a context as well as a mean for measuring the role of the positive evidence for second language learning. WebCT electronic bulletin boards were introduced as supplements to five intermediate French as a second language classes (n=132) for two semesters. Internal tracking as well as well as questionnaires, interviews and pre/post tests provided the tools to identify and quantify the role of the positive evidence for second language learning.

Results clearly show that electronic bulletin boards define a new second language literacy expurgating negotiation of meaning and recasts from students’ interactions and focusing on reading for positive evidences integrated in subsequent electronic responses. This new form of literacy places the second language learner in a position where accurate writing is crucial to be read and where focus on form is triggered by internal (throughput) rather than external (input-output) information processing.

Using these results, the paper will also consider the key research questions that will enable further, more extensive quantitative evaluation of such developments to be undertaken including the effectiveness of student use
of these facilities, the changes in teaching strategy required by a range of staff, and so on. Finally, this study will raise the generic question of research methodology and the robustness of the kind of research that it represents in the context of EUROCALL's ongoing concern with the recognition of CALL research in the wider academic world. This investigation will be considered in relation to the generic research criteria used in other academic disciplines. It will be argued that CALL research, properly conducted, is no less robust and reliable than many more traditional, long-standing and prestigious areas of research, and can often be better.

This has been the goal underlying the most recent work carried out by the CAMILLE* R+D Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia: the creation of a Web-delivered language-independent CALL authoring shell capable of managing databases on a remote server and allowing language teachers from around the world to design and publish materials to suit their students’ particular needs. The implementation of the materials has been based on the template approach to authoring and includes templates that integrate video, graphics, audio and text. The X-funded project is called Proyecto IN6ENIO.

Besides having designed the authoring shell, a “content manager” has also been developed to allow language specialists to create a database from which to select materials. This content manager organises the multimedia components and the materials according to predefined specifications (e.g. language, level, skill, etc.) and delivers the contents in the form of a completed online language course.

In addition, a Learning Environment offering courseware for learners of English for Engineering Purposes has also been produced. The author will refer to the theory underlying the creation of such a learning environment and its implications on future developments. The session will include an online demonstration of the system.
* Computer Assisted Multimedia Interactive Language Learning Environment

Between 1997 and 2000 we were devoted to developing and testing our dedicated physical CALL classroom model; in the period 2000 - 2003 we have been focused on both sustaining this and improving our procedures. Refining the coaching and interactive feedback procedures for both text and voice development within the virtual classroom model (established at the Institute for Living Languages at the KU Leuven in 1997) informs the focus of our research. During this period, the resulting models have been rigorously tested by about three hundred KU Leuven students, half of which are post graduates and half of which are undergraduates.

The specific need for refined coaching and feedback for doctoral students is first defined, then the concept, procedure and results of three models are outlined and illustrated. The models include a text marking and coaching model, a speech marking and coaching model and a model to contextualise and manage the interactive cycle of learner, peer and coach writing and speaking processes. Key to our findings is the fact that our models help us to help learners differentiate between passive to active retrieval plus transfer issues versus knowledge gap issues. The discussion centres on further model development integration.

Learning modules are organized in two levels - L1 “Everyday Czech” and L2 “Czech in clinical practice”. Besides there is a separate module on Czech grammar, a Czech-English dictionary, and a notepad. The learning modules contain tasks in all 4 basic skills yet the emphasis is on listening comprehension and interaction in spoken language - our students need to talk and listen to their patients when taking history and performing physical examination. To achieve this goal, there are plentiful listening and pronunciation exercises. A recording device is incorporated to let students listen to their own pronunciation. Writing in Czech is hardly ever required, so writing tasks are limited. Progress tests with diagnostic features are built in both levels. The Czech-English dictionary includes pronunciation of all words and each vocabulary entry is linked to the respective explanation of its grammatical nature.

Currently, the application is still being developed and tested. By the end of 2003 it shall be completed and published on the website of 3rd Faculty of Medicine, Charles University where the project runs. An off-line version (CD-ROM) shall also be released. Moreover, we envision co-operation with the EUROMOBIL II project.

My study is informed by a Sociocultural model of language learning, and is based on the observation of university students of Spanish carrying out problem-solving tasks in pairs. The data collected has enabled me to investigate the role of the computer as a mediating tool within the processes of inter-mental activity, as well as the role of mediated interaction in language learning processes. This kind of work will enhance our knowledge of the computer as an aid for language learning, and will provide a stepping-stone for teachers and materials designers to make informed choices for the use and development of CALL.

One way to investigate the learner language, for instance, is to gather spoken and/or written learner corpora and analyze them. The analysis of language learner corpora can reveal a mine of information which in turn can reveal insights into the learner profile. Generally, in the case of written corpora, this analysis will focus on the types of errors made by the learner, errors which will have been identified manually throughout the corpus - with the help of an error grid, and then compiled statistically.

In this paper, I will argue for the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques in order to extract information from learner corpora. I will first present an NLP tool enabling one to do so: the parser, which, conditions being right, can be used safely against learner corpora. Then, I will discuss how useful information can be extracted from learner corpora with a parser and then analysed. Finally, I will show how the results provide more comprehensive insights into the learner profile.

Unfortunately, developers of CALL-tools for L2 reading rarely make the most of the resource that a computerised environment provides. Many tools are developed without the necessary concern about what research tell us about how reading skills in a L2 are actually best developed.

The aim of this paper is to present current L2 reading research relevant to developers of CALL-tools in order to show:

1. What do we need to know about the reading process?
a. The decoding process
b. Strategies: Bottom-up and top-down
c. Intensive vs. extensive reading
2. Which reading strategies are developed how?
a. Which skill do we want to develop?
b. Vocabulary and grammar vs. reading
3. When is the use of CALL-tools especially appropriate for teaching L2 reading?
a. One skill - one tool
b. Level testing, interaction and motivation

The presentation is based on an ongoing research project about L2 reading in Arabic and the development of a computer-assisted tool for reading in Arabic at the University of Southern Denmark.

BACK

In order to successfully input Japanese, one must have the accurate orthographic as well as lexical knowledge of each word because the conversion process does not allow incorrect inputs. This presents a significant problem in developing an online writing ability for non-native speakers of Japanese. However, there has been little research done on the typing process by Asian learners of Japanese, and no studies have ever been conducted on English-speaking learners (Tsuchiya, 2000).

The present study is the first one to compare two groups of learners (Chinese speakers and English speakers) when they type in Japanese. Second-year students participated in the study and were asked to type their own hand-written drafts of compositions. Their performances were recorded by videotaping the computer screen. The video recordings were carefully transcribed, and errors were identified. A quantitative analysis revealed three categories of errors: mechanical errors, performance errors, and cognitive errors.

Mechanical errors were caused by the lack of mechanical knowledge in performing conversions (e.g. when to initiate conversion). Systematic instructional materials in word processing should eliminate mechanical errors.
Many of the cognitive errors were caused by incomplete phonetic knowledge of lexical items. For example, Chinese-speaking students made more substitution errors between voiced and voiceless stops (/t/ vs. /d/ and /k/ vs. /g/) than English-speaking students did. Since the current conversion program cannot handle this type of errors, it is necessary to improve the conversion program specifically for non-native speakers (Hatasa 2001).

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

According to White (1995) the demands and opportunities of a distance learning context make it necessary for students to re-evaluate their role and responsibilities as language learners and their need for self-direction requires them to develop a comparatively higher degree of metacognitive knowledge, particularly in terms of self- or person knowledge. Her studies also reveal that distance language learners make greater use of metacognitive strategies than do classroom learners, self-management being the most frequently used.

Apart from the work of White (1995, 1997 and 1999) and Hurd (2000, 2002), and Hurd et al. (2001), however, there seems to be very little recent research published about the link between self-awareness, strategic competence and effective learning taking into account the particular situation of distance language learners. This is particularly true with regard to the role of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies in distance language learning within virtual contexts such as Lyceum. Moreover Erben’s more general claim that audio-graphic technology “remains under-researched and under-theorised” (1999:230) is also still true.

In my study I have explored whether awareness raising activities for metacognitive knowledge acquisition as advocated by Wenden (1998) and instructed self-management training on the basis of strategies based instruction (SBI) as defined by Cohen (1998) can foster ‘metacognitive growth’ (White 1999) in learners. Furthermore I wanted to find out how this approach to more efficient metacognitive strategy use could potentially lead to an increase in the students’ degree of autonomy in collaborative virtual learning environments (CVLEs) such as Lyceum.

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

All the long-distance Web exchanges are conducted in the students’ native language as this permits hidden cultural values to come to light. The comparison of the two nationalities’ responses to the questionnaires and the forum discussions provide raw data for class discussions and written assignments which are carried out in the students’ target language. The Forums for the two groups varied greatly: while one group enjoyed a lively exchange of opinions and beliefs, the other group was less interactive and the discussion rarely went beyond two turns. Both groups also participated in video conferences with their American partners and in several ways the video discussions mirrored the Forum exchanges.

This presentation looks at some of the factors which may have led to the different experiences of the two groups at Padova University and investigates the extent to which the quality and amount of interaction affected student motivation, as reported in learner diaries and class assignments.

Thus, this paper will present the outcome of an on-going evaluation at London Metropolitan University intended to update its overall language student profile originally established in 1995 and 1997. This new student profiling, based on questionnaires, focus groups and user walkthroughs using the Language Studies Department's own interactive language learning material will also attempt to shed further light on expertise and across a range of foreign languages. In particular, it will focus on Classical Arabic students, currently practising with newly designed online CALL material, with a view to identifying different attitudes, approaches and needs.

A language course concept that incorporates a variety of media to train the four skills receives added value when students are engaged in activities which will not only let them reach their immediate goals of learning a foreign language and receiving a grade for the course. The activities should also provide them with skills and competencies they can employ throughout their lives such as using different media effectively also in other life contexts.
This paper will provide a brief overview of information literacy culminating in a definition that can be used as a starting point for exploring and re-thinking language teaching and the incorporation of lifelong learning activities into the language curriculum.

In spite of this increase, however, relatively little research has been conducted on the attitudes of foreign language students and their teachers regarding plagiarism. One notable exception is Thomson and Williams (1995), who found that Asian students of English had views on copying that were quite different from those held by their teachers. In addition, Hyland (2001), who observed that teachers’ lack of clarity regarding plagiarism often led to misunderstandings by their Chinese students. To date, however, very little research of this type has been conducted in a foreign language setting with students in the West.

In this qualitative study, the issue was examined within the context of the online English language courses at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. Student contributions to a classroom discussion on plagiarism were analysed. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with their teachers to learn their views on the subject. The major findings of this study will be resented, and will be followed by a discussion of the implications for foreign language teaching.

This presentation starts from the assumption that students using technology need to know more than just how that technology operates: they need to know how it can be effectively controlled in the pursuit of language learning objectives. It opens by exploring the rationale for dedicated learner training for CALL, both at the general level and the level of specific applications. It then reviews a model previously developed by the presenter comprising five principles to guide learner training schemes: 1) experience CALL yourself; 2) give learners teacher training; 3) use a cyclic approach; 4) use collaborative debriefings; 5) teach general exploitation strategies. The final segment of the presentation expands on the fifth principle, through the demonstration of a number of general exploitation strategies suitable for a variety of CALL activity types. They include techniques for using help features appropriately, making easy material more challenging, increasing individual motivation, and adapting CALL lessons for uses other than their original intent.

700 UK students, aged 14-19, were asked to identify a Web site that they liked and to state their main reason for liking it. They were invited to include recreational sites and told that their answers could help with Web design.
Initial analysis categorised the sites and reasons for liking them. Students nominated search engines and academic sites, sites dedicated to hobbies, enthusiasms, youth culture and shopping. Reasons included functionality, aspects of usability, interactions, visual attributes, support for schoolwork, ethos, cultural and heritage associations, as well as the appeal of the content.
Interviews with volunteers were conducted, to probe more deeply into the reasons. One focus was on whether positive reaction to a site was related to presentation or content, or how the two were balanced.

Sets of guidelines on usability, accessibility, and instructional design are available to designers of Web-based language learning resources. Using the interview data, and drawing on an evaluation of representative sites from the list, a set of design goals for a new Web-based language-learning environment was derived. The new site implemented findings from the research, taking account of the students’ visual and Web literacies, and the balance between content and presentation. Existing design guidelines may need some modification, in the light of this research.

BACK

This end scenario, as illustrated by four case studies, points towards a new instructional design for L2 technical writing, with these main content elements: reading for meaning; mimicry of sentence, paragraph and linking styles; rewriting from an edited draft; and strong reading of alternative phrasings for specificity of meaning.

This new instructional design is best carried out in a computer-mediated scenario for two reasons: (1) efficiency in composition strategy (rather than composition) tasks, especially those involving text manipulation, and (2) realistic mimicry of target behaviors. One such instructional design is described here.

English classes are integrated in character developing the 4 skills simultaneously and include reading professional texts, writing, with grammatical explanations and practicing, professional communication and listening comprehension. Usually, all these modules are taught on the basis of professional discourse. Particular work is conducted to teach subject field terminology. The method of “derivational tree” is very often of great help for the teacher’s work. Acquiring deep terminology knowledge greatly contributes to widening students’ subject field knowledge, since they can study professional problems from literature in the original (the most important sources on Ecology, Law and many other subjects are published or can be found on the Internet in English). This, in its turn, is a good motivation for students’ work in ESP classes.

To teach professional writing the most important elements of an Academic writing course are also included. Document design, clarity, grammar, punctuation and mechanics are taken into account by the teacher in the process of preparing assignments for students in order to teach them how to write essays, summaries and research papers on professional themes. Developing listening comprehension and professional communication skills is usually done in an integrated way and many productive and reproductive exercises have been prepared for this purpose. Learning Internet professional communication is of particular interest nowadays for Ukrainian students and it is done by them with great enthusiasm. In this integrated way considerable results are achieved in ESP classes.

Typical lessons and how to make Web-based lessons are demonstrated in the presentation, and the results of evaluation surveys conducted with EFL students at our college are outlined. The survey results show that Web-based lessons with video clips help students to understand the context of conversational patterns and that the use of topics relevant to their lives has motivated them in their study of English. Web-based classes also help to shift the focus from a teacher-centered classroom environment to student-centered independent language learning. (204 words)

URL(s) relevant to the presentation
§ Jun's English Lab
http://black-gw.matsue-ct.ac.jp:8087/foreign/iwata/
§ Web-based lessons with Streaming Video clips
http://black-gw.matsue-ct.ac.jp:8087/foreign/class/stream/index.html

Many variables are said to play a role in determining the frequency and the type of learning strategies such as intelligence, sex, personality, learning styles, pervious experience, motivation, attitude, and so on. It is the contention of this study that the type of learning environment is also a determining factor. To test this hypothesis, a study was designed to find out if the proficiency levels of a group of EFL learners receiving instruction through a CALL program showed statistically significant effects for strategy use at overall and category level. Not only did the findings indicate a positive variation between proficiency levels and overall strategy use, they also proved that there were meaningful differences in strategy categories and items used by more and less proficient computer-assisted language learners. These findings have critical implications for strategy training for CALL learners.

During this presentation, it will be demonstrated how these types of exercises may be implemented in Ellips, a Web-based language learning program to be used in conjunction with general-purpose virtual learning environments such as Blackboard and WebCT. The following features of Ellips will be demonstrated in more detail:
§ Authoring module. Ellips includes a Web-based authoring system, which allows content developers / teachers to implement language learning exercises on the basis of templates for the most commonly used exercise types.
§ CEF coding scheme. Ellips makes use of metadata derived from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. This makes it possible for content developers / teachers to find exercises from the Ellips database and re-use them to suit their own particular needs.
§ Adaptive exercise mechanism. A scoring mechanism keeps track of students’ performance, offering additional exercises for areas not yet mastered.
§ High-quality streaming audio and video on the Web. Dutch universities make use of a high-end internet infrastructure. It will be shown how Ellips makes use of this in delivering exercises for listening and pronunciation.
§ Web-based recording. Ellips makes use of a Web-based language recorder. Student input may be saved to the Web for review by teachers and peers.

Ellips is being developed by a consortium of Dutch universities. The languages involved include English, Spanish, Dutch and Arabic.

The Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä is responsible for academic and discipline-based language and communication instruction (compulsory for all academic degrees, 12,500 students) and consultation at the university. Language Centre provides contact teaching in 12 languages and offers the possibility of self-access study in further 18 languages. It aims at activating and developing language skills for both academic study and professional life.

This demonstration presents one module of departmental development project which is aimed at developing language centre teaching to meet the new challenges of professional life and the need for distance education and the use of modern information and communication technology in language teaching. We will present experiences and outcomes of a Web-based German language course for economic students (Wirtschaftsdeutsch). The student feedback and the experiences of the teacher have been taken into account in developing the course further and planning another Web-based German course which will also be offered for full-time students.

The main themes of this pilot project were e.g.:
§ diversifying language teaching according to the needs of non-traditional student groups (e.g. adult working students)
§ development of Web-based teaching modules suitable for language and communication teaching
§ promoting students’ self-directiveness
§ development of tutoring and counselling practices

The pilot group consists of economic students who study within the national education, research and development project TUKEVA, funded by the European Social Fund. The project is designed for personnel at vocational training centres, as well as all those who deal with vocational training at companies and other organisations. Essential aims of the project include updating the skills of those participating and at the same time upgrading their academic level. At the University of Jyväskylä the TUKEVA-students aim at Master’s Degree in the field of Business and Economics. TUKEVA-students are working students within the age-group 25-55. Due to their different educational background their language skill level as well as language learning skills vary largely. This is a fact that has to be taken into account in traditional contact teaching and distance learning as well as in giving instruction through modern media, e.g. internet.

Freshman university students in EFL in intact classes (2 elementary classes, 2 lower intermediate) will first be surveyed regarding their cell phone use and pre-tested to assess their knowledge of target learning structures. Following this they will be subdivided into four groups (a) using cell phone text messages, (b) using computer email, (c) doing the exercise as a speaking task, (d) no task. Next they will be paired, trained with warm-up tasks, and given two tasks to complete (one in class and the other at home). The task sheets will include the target structures in a ‘useful phrases’ box. All messages sent during the tasks will be saved for analysis. In addition the speaking task pairs will be recorded and samples transcribed for comparison. Finally learners will receive a post test the following week to assess the short-term learning gains.

If there are signs of adequate use of English and gains in vocabulary among mobile phone users we might be able to recommend cell phones as tools of learning rather than sources of annoyance.

References
Greenfield, R. (2003) “Collaborative e-mail exchange for teaching secondary ESL: a case study in Hong Kong.” Language Learning and Technology Vol7, No.1, 46-70.
Gonzalez-Lloret, M. (2003) “Designing Task-based CALL to promote interaction En Busca de Esmeraldas” Language Learning and Technology Vol7, No.1, 86-104.
Nunan, D. (1989) Designing tasks for the communicative classroom. Cambridge: CUP.

The TUFS Language Education Module Project officially started in October 2002 and its P-Module is scheduled to be on the website mid-April 2003. At the time of writing, scripts have been completed, and it is now in the middle of the design and development process of the website material. Recording will start next week. By the time of the conference, the P-module will have been actually used for a few months, and it is expected that not only the e-learning material per se but its evaluation will be presented at the conference.

TUFS is Japan’s largest academic centre of language, information, culture, literature and other international studies, and embraces not only specialists in linguistics and language education but those in informatics as well. Such an environment enables TUFS to serve as an ideal incubator to develop state-of-the-art multilingual e-learning materials. With the exception of English, multilingual e-learning materials are still underdeveloped. One of the innovative features of this project is seen in the fact that such a vast multilingual e-learning system including Asian languages has yet to be made anywhere in the world, and that pronunciation is essentially a boring exercise, but e-learning can turn this boring but important exercise into fun.

Topic of investigation
The idea of our interactive programme was born by necessity as mentioned above. Students are interested in computing, and sometimes they are even experts, but it can happen that they can not be motivated to learn languages in the traditional way. We had to realise that literacy has changed because we face the problem that they do not like reading, they are not interested in the culture, geography, life etc. of other nations or their own, but they can spend long hours reading everything on the NET. That was the reason why we decided to connect these two fields in the form of an interactive game, which is basically written by them. The game requires knowledge of English and Hungarian cultural backgrounds, geographical information etc. My presentation would introduce this game to encourage other teachers to be brave enough to use this new technology.

The previous studies in face-to-face task-based interactions demonstrate the significant differences between NNS-NNS and NNS-NS interactions with respect to the types of feedback, modified input and the frequency of negotiations (Gass and Varonis 1985; Pica et al, 1996; Shehadah 1999; Garcia Mayo and Pica 2000). CMC interactions have distinguishable features from face-to-face interactions (i.e., anonymity and less non-verbal expressions, text-based interactions, etc.) and such features may cause the different environment for language learning from what face-to-face interactions provide.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate how NNS-NS and NNS-NNS interaction in e-mail exchanges is similar or different from the findings in face-to-face interactions with respect to language learning. The data consists of task-based e-mail exchanges between a pair of NNS-NNS and NNS-NS over a six-week period. A total of fifty NNS participants are from two separate second year Japanese language classes at a college in the United States.

The study will demonstrate 1) How the frequency and types of feedback, modified input, and negotiations are similar or different between NNS-NNS and NNS-NS, both qualitatively and quantitatively and 2) How the asynchronous CMC interactions are different from face-to-face interactions. The findings of the study will suggest that NNS-NS e-mail exchanges should be encouraged more regularly in foreign language environments.

Works Cited
Garcia, M. & Pica, T. (2000). Is the EFL environment a language-learning environment? Educational Linguistics, 16 (1), 1-23.
Gass, S., & Varonis, E. (1985). Task variation and nonnative-nonnative negotiation of meaning. In S. Gass & C. Madden (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp.149-161). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Pica, T., Lincoln-Porter, F., Paninos, D., & Linnell, J. (1996). Language learners’ interaction: How does it address the input, output, and feedback needs for L2 learners? TESOL Quartely, 30, 59-84.
Shehadah, A. (1999). Non-native speakers’ production of modified comprehensible output and second language learning. Language Learning, 49 (4), 627-675.

Some of these, such as those for quizzes and tests of grammar, idioms, or vocabulary and learning materials, are directly usable with students in the classroom or for independent study. Others, like Web pages of professional organizations and mailing lists, lesson plans, resource libraries, and Web pages with information on almost any conceivable subject, help teachers with professional development or with finding useful background information for class preparation. In addition, there are pages that help either students or teachers use the Internet more effectively, for example, search engines and netiquette-related pages.

Other Web pages, including Web pages for keypal projects where students can find other English language students to correspond with, chat and MOOs, and e-mail, allow students to interact with others, which is especially useful for students who in EFL settings who have little opportunity to interact with others in English. Among the other Web pages we will introduce are ones for typing, Web-based projects, homepages, library searches, museums, dictionaries, testing, movies, mass media, and study abroad, and teachers' homepages.

I have used mailing lists to gather information and resources for the class and also to allow students to communicate in English. I have taught students to gather information by using search engines and links pages. I have taught students to evaluate resources online, and have given them assignments to make their own Web pages of cultural projects. Students’ essays are posted on the Web, and, after their classmates had critiqued them, students could revise their essays. The final projects are posted permanently, and they are useful as teaching materials for future students.

The Internet has made my English classes more communicative and meaningful for students. They enjoyed the classes a great deal. In this presentation, I will give an overview of how computers can be used by English language teachers and students, and some dos and don’ts of using computers and the Internet for language teaching.

This project, which can be done by groups, pairs, or individuals, includes many processes of communication and language learning. Students choose a topic they are interested in, collect information on that particular topic, read the information critically, choose relevant information and organize it, synthesize the information in a way that is easy for readers to understand, and make a Web page to make their writings available to others around the world.

This project includes many important skills students need to develop at university level and gives them an opportunity to study communication and English, and, if this is done as a pair or group project, gives them a chance to learn collaboratively. They learn audience analysis, communicating with others, and making presentations. They also learn the basics of research, writing, the Internet, and even the making of HTML files. In this presentation we will discussed advantages and disadvantages of this project, explain how to do this project successfully and point out some useful Internet resources for this type of project.

Secondary school teachers generally use the Internet in three ways, using e-mail, chat or bulletin boards; using it as a resource for gathering information; and making and posting Web pages. Each of these involves problems. Among the principles I suggest to teachers are:
1. Recognize that the Internet is only one supplementary tool for teaching English.
2. Have a clear purpose for using the Internet, and use it only as much as necessary to fulfill that purpose.
3. Give students concrete, easy tasks.
4. Provide specific and concrete directions on how to use the Internet in easy English for an assignment. Supplement the directions with examples, including counterexamples.
5. If possible, use an Intranet at first so students can practice. For example, teachers can provide a limited number of Web pages for students' research, or allow them to use chat with each other at first.

Using these and other suggestions, I believe that the Internet can become more useful both for improving students' English and improving international understanding.

For most students, this project is their first opportunity to think about audience analysis and analysis of content as well as the purpose of the book, the author's intent, etc., when they read. Through this project, students write something that will be of use to others rather than just writing for an assignment, and they take the work more seriously. It also helps students think about what the characteristics of a book are, what it is they find interesting about a book, and so on. In this presentation, I will describe the process of giving this assignment and doing peer criticism and show examples of students’ work.

In order for the instruction to be effective - bearing in mind that the feedback on weekly assignments is the essential component of the instruction - the turn-around time must be minimal. Individualized feedback within the time constraints makes great demands on the instructor. Furthermore, in order for the course to be cost- effective, the institution insists on a minimum number of participants, making the instructors' workload even more difficult to manage. Students' enrollment for these courses is increasing, yet fewer instructors are willing to teach them. Therefore, we are looking for ways to satisfy the needs and demands of the students, the instructors and the institution. The solution that we are examining is feedback which is generalized rather than individualized, while maintaining the quality of the instruction.

This study compares the effects of two modes of feedback - personalized vs. generalized, on attitudes and performance in an advanced EFL academic reading course. The feedback in both modes relates to processes (reading strategies; language elements; rhetorical patterns and other relevant teaching points) and not just the correct answer. In the "personalized" mode, the instructor addresses each student individually whereas in the "generalized" mode, comprehensive feedback is provided to all the questions and e-mailed to all students. Each student is responsible for comparing his/her answers with the generalized feedback in order to determine whether s/he has responded correctly. In case of discrepancies, students are advised to initiate contact with the instructor via email or phone for clarifications.

Findings will be presented and implications for online teaching/ learning will be discussed.

The aim of this study is to determine whether students view video taped lessons as an effective alternative to classroom meetings. The focus will be on exam preparation since passing the exam is the main criterion for success, and students are anxious to receive adequate preparation for that purpose. Questionnaires will be administered to students in two parallel groups taught by the same instructor. In one group students will attend the three classroom sessions and the other group will receive the CD recording of the sessions taught by the same instructor. Attitudes towards these taped sessions as well as exam performance will be reported and implications for broader use of pre-recorded lessons on CD ROM will be discussed.

BACK

The introduction of online tuition contributes to the enrichment of methodology in foreign language teaching, and a higher motivation for, and intensity of, foreign language learning. It also, of course, means easier access to foreign language learning. Students can proceed at their own pace and use their knowledge of other subjects, such as the humanities, information technology, or economics.

In the presentation we are going to introduce a few chapters of the online course which helps to improve students´ language knowledge and skills, particularly the skills of formal writing, and multi-media literacy. Moreover, we will demonstrate how to create such a course with the help of the e-learning system. The purpose of the presentation is to share our experience and show the advantages and disadvantages of working with such a system. The main focus will be on the important tools (eg. evaluation tools, communication tools, progress checking tools, quizzes, etc.) that these systems should provide.

This paper, therefore, attempts to reintroduce this issue into the CALL (research) agenda by reporting on a teacher survey conducted among EFL teachers in a school district in Germany. By means of a written questionnaire (consisting of 75 mostly Likert-type items), the survey investigates the actual implementation of CALL by the teachers questioned in relation to the teachers’ computer literacy and their attitudes toward (a) the use of computers in EFL learning and teaching, (b) project-oriented learning, (c) autonomous learning, (d) co-operative learning, and (e) meaning-focused (vs. form-focused) classroom activities.

The examination of these factors is intended to shed light on teachers’ preferences and needs, representing the “breeding ground” for the implementation of CALL. Based on the findings of the survey, which is supplemented by qualitative data gathered from interviews with select teachers, it is suggested that the adaptation of the principles of task-based language learning may facilitate the initial implementation of CALL and, thus, the development of teachers’ “CALL literacy.”

The PRONETT portal is expected to offer a virtual infrastructure that supports teachers educators and trainees and inservice teachers in the (co)production, execution and evaluation of pratice based ILT-rich learning. Access to concrete learning objects will facilitate reuse of educational content and stimulate the dialogue between educational organisations and actors (teacher educator, teacher trainee, schoolbased coaches and inservice teachers). This dialogue is seen as preconditional for the development and sharing of knowledge related to ICT-related methodology in subject teaching.

Currently mainly student teachers from the core project partners based in Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain and Wales (UK) participate. It is assumed that collaboration between Portal members will start at a local level in and between regional organisations (Archimedes Learenopleidingen + affiliated professional development schools). At the same time however collaboration between individual portal members at an international level is expected to be most likely and particularly useful in the domains of Modern Languages and for schools with an explicit international focus and a dual language curriculum.

The experiments of individual teacher educators and students teachers of the English and Spanish departments will be reported. They will be using the portal for a variety of purposes: to support blended learning arrangements, as a workspace and authentic setting for use of the target language and for the development of professional CALL and ICT-E competencies.

This pilot implementation should provide models, procedures and materials to facilitate full implementation at a regional level and to contribute to PRONETT's dissemination targets in scaling up the project at (inter)national level. The related project activities and strategies used will be described.

Results and deliverables realised in the first phase of project (2000-2002) such as the website, lesson template, database with quality-assured TalenQuests, the theoretical basis for the project work and design support for TalenQuest authors have been described in previous publications. To highlight the essential features of the pedagogic model underlying the TalenQuest concept and to differentiate it from other, possibly attractive webbased activities a rubric has also been made available. It currently is a list of characteristics describing 2 extreme positions: a ‘traditional’ activity (using WWW) on the one hand and an ideal TalenQuest on the other.

In this paper we enlarge on the development of this rubric. Arguments for the rationale behind its features on the basis of a selection from the three sets of criteria mentioned below will be put forward:
§ the critical attributes of the WebQuest Page Model
§ criteria based on communicative language teaching approaches
§ principles of taskbased language learning.

The online version of the present paper, previous publications referred to and an international forum on the design and implementation of TalenQuests can be accessed at: http://www.koenraad.info/CALL.

This paper approaches the topic through two cases. The first illustrates a sixth form student (18yrs) hanging on the net at home, interacting simultaneously with different groups of people through various Internet tools depending on the purpose of communication. This case is related to another, which deals with participants on a university Web course, which joined students of English and student teachers of English, mainly from two Finnish universities, for three-months. One particular group on this course has been selected for closer analysis. Its members were not used to technology, but they had excellent methods for negotiating and sharing goals and working modes for accomplishing their project.

The data for the analysis include different kinds of visual and textual information from the Web environment as well as video data from face-to-face encounters and a videoconference. Interviews and observation records are also used in the study. The data is approached from a multimodal discourse perspective. The paper elaborates on the notions of literacy and language learning from the point of view of situated practice as displayed through the case studies. The results have implications for pedagogic planning and the evaluation of competencies in terms of language, communication and literacy.

The following characteristics make computers a suitable tool for autonomous knowledge construction: first, interactivity, which allows the necessary individualisation of the language acquisition and discovery process; second, multimedia, which is helpful for multi-channel language learning; and finally the immediate connection to the internet, which offers authentic language material as well as special language teaching tools.

Concerning the practical use of computers for inductive grammar teaching and learning, language teachers can be considered lucky: although computers are not suitable partners for free communication, they are ideal tools for inductive learning techniques, as these techniques do not focus on language production (technical implementation of which is extremely complex or even impossible) but on learners manipulating language input offered by the computer, which is easy to implement and to process.

Especially the use of authoring tools enables teachers without programming skills to create cognitively challenging and diversified computer-assisted grammar lessons. The website Indugramma (http://indugramma.ladurner.org) illustrates inductive grammar activities and explains the tools used for their creation. As an inspiring online service, it aims to be of practical help to language teachers for the autonomous creation of computer-based inductive activities.

We (two teachers of German and Japanese Business communication at the Helsinki School of Economics) completed the eight-month long national training program in March 2003. The 150 participants in the program came from all twenty Finnish universities. The training program including two face-to-face seminars was run online. We also had regular mentor-led meetings where we met with the other three participants from our own university. The mentors were colleagues who had participated in another national ICT training program focusing on staff development.

In our poster we will first briefly describe the structure and contents of the national training program. We will then demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of the program from our own perspective as long-time language and business communication teachers. Finally, our poster will also describe the Web-based projects that we produced for our own German and Japanese courses as part of the required course work during the training program.

Training and Research in the Information Society. A National Strategy for 2000-2004. The Finnish Ministry of Education 1999.
http://www.minedu.fi/julkaisut/information/englishU/welcome.html

Although we will demonstrate particular examples in Japanese, our concepts and methods are extensible to all languages, especially those that employ non-roman scripts. We will show how authentic cultural content in the form of videos, Web materials, and supplemental audio exercises can be adapted to the handheld.

We are discovering that the handheld promises to be much more than an electronic flash-card mechanism and are beginning to think of it as a self-contained learning system that can provide not only complete portability (learning “anytime, anywhere”), but also targeted content (“language-as-needed” rather than “all-the-language-you-need”). Furthermore, we think this technology could be important beyond the language classroom, infusing linguistic content into cultural studies courses.

The paper will delve into the theoretical framework of learning styles and demonstrate a taxonomy based on the latest research. Furthermore it will show how to integrate learning styles in a Web- and CD ROM-based German Grammar for HE programmes that will be published in 2004.

This paper investigates second language output within an electronic role-play setting, based on a subject-specific problem solving task and the internet as source of primary information. The project took place during a 4-week period in which the language class was taught in a computer room.

In five groups, each consisting of two students, the subjects investigate the market conditions for a specific product to be launched in Germany and develop collaboratively a marketing strategy for that product. Students discuss their approach with their partner, but communicate via email with the other groups. Data collected consists of the following corpora: emails exchanged between groups, the recorded discussions between each group's members while engaged in the problem solving activity, oral presentation of the groups' results as well as the individually written summaries. The paper's focus is on discourse analysis of the language output produced by students.

Areas of particular interest are:
§ The analysis of the oral L2 output while solving a computer-assisted language-learning task: How can the oral interaction be characterised? What kind of conclusions regarding the use of CALL can be drawn from the comparison of the oral interaction and the written output (in form of emails to other groups and the written report)?
§ The analysis of the written L2 output: Is there evidence of SLA? Can such a CALL setting promote SLA?
§ The identification of student initiated focus on language form.

Among others, the paper draws on output theory and the works of Ellis, Pica, Swain and Lapkin as well as Chapelle.

Selected bibliography
Chapelle, C. 2001. Computer Applications in Second Language Acquisition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chapelle, C. 1997. "CALL in the year 2000: Still in search of research paradigms?", Language Learning & Technology, Vol 1 (1): 19-43. http://llt.msu.edu/vol1num1/chapelle/default.html
Ellis, R. 1999. Learning a second language through interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Publishing Company.
Pica, T. 1994. "Research on negotiation: What does it reveal about second language learning conditions, processes and outcomes?" Language Learning 44, pp. 493-527.
Swain, M., Lapkin, S. 1995. ‘Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step towards SLA’, Applied Linguistics, Vol. 16, No. 3, OUP.

This paper describes how students experience the three members peer-group interaction when working collaboratively and to solve a problem in a foreign language; How do they evaluate their own participation and contributions to the group? What kind of interaction is experienced positively and negatively in collaboration and does it influence learning? The analysis of the study is based on questionnaires and the students' online diaries in their native language, during the eight-week online course in Finnish as a foreign language.

This online course is offered during the spring term 2003, and there are 27 participants all around the world. The course is based on the CSCL-model, and it is designed for the levels B1 - B2 of the Council of Europe 6-level scale from A1 to C2. The course is structured around a role-play in which the student groups have to participate in a competition and plan a trip to Finland. It is hoped that using a role-play will create authentic-like situations to use Finnish and to motivate students in target language use. To do the tasks students need to engage collaborative dialogue and negotiate with their peers which is aimed to increase the amount and quality of interaction. The main goal of this project is to discover if the CSCL-model can motivate students to interact.

Special attention is given to students’ behaviour and learning styles, in particular:
§ time spent with exercises (reading instructions and texts, navigating, typing, etc.);
§ use of aids (clues given, glosses, dictionaries);
§ success solving task.

The following hypotheses are put to the test in this study:

1. The use of computers is more effective than conventional teaching tools in that it allows learners to go through the exercises at their own pace. Therefore, faster students that normally would have to pause until everybody else has finished with a particular exercise can more effectively use this time by doing additional exercises that suit their learning needs.

2. It is assumed that the use of computers has the potential to support all kinds of learning styles and promotes differentiated learning within a classroom much more than traditional teaching tools.

3. Incidental vocabulary acquisition is facilitated. This assumption is investigated using glossed texts. It is observed how and when such aids are used.

The learners are classified according to different learner styles. Based on the information gained from the case study a taxonomy of learning styles based on Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory as well as the Felder-Silverman Model is suggested to allow a differentiation of types of navigation.

Le présentateur se propose de montrer qu’Il s’agit ici d’un outil pratique, constamment remis à jour (nouveaux liens, liens périmés), qui permet à un tuteur expert, un choix ad hoc, une souplesse d’utilisation, une didactique diversifiée adaptable à la méthode utilisée, aux intérêts, aux besoins, ainsi qu’aux différents styles d’apprentissage des apprenants. De même, il sera montré comment cet outil permet aux apprenants, guidés par leur tuteur - leur “guide touristique” - de goûter au plaisir réel qu’offre gratuitement un séjour linguistique virtuel dans un pays de la langue cible.

During the session, the audience will be offered the opportunity to get acquainted with some excellent free authentic multimedia programs on the Internet for English, French, Spanish, and German. Participants will get a taste of some selected sites for these four languages. The presenter will demonstrate how by making ad-hoc choices from the selected resources, the facilitator can adapt them to the curriculum and to different needs of learners.

Topics covered will include a theoretical background for assisting teachers to conceptualize their own course and progression with CALL, practical consideration in implementing interactive multimedia sites and a discussion of possible alternative applications.

Keeping in mind the above-mentioned considerations, this session will showcase practical tools for Language teachers that can easily be integrated into classroom study. Ten practical examples and ideas for using CALL in a communicative manner will be provided. These ten simple but very effective tech tools will be presented for use in the classroom for language teachers, even for those with limited CALL experience.

Thus, all language teachers, even those who are tech-shy, are invited to join us for an adventure that will revolutionize their language classroom, enhance their teaching, improve communication, raise test scores and above all – increase students’ motivation and enthusiasm! No need to reinvent the wheel: the tools are here ready to be used to make language teaching even more dynamic and interesting.

Target audience:
Novice CALL, Up CALL & anyone involved in the training of language teachers.

After a short overview of the FreeText project, we will present the different NLP tools developed therein and discuss how each can provide the learner with a good feedback:

§ The sentence viewer displays a color representation of any sentence typed in by the learner: syntactic functions are shown by layered colored underscores while lexical categories are marked by different font colors. Lexical information such as category, gender, tense, etc. is displayed when the mouse goes over the specific words.
§ The syntactic tree output makes hierarchical relations more visible and shows different relations in the sentence (e.g. between a relative pronoun and its antecedent).
§ The error diagnosis system detects specific types of errors in the learners' inputs, such as gender, number and person agreement or verb and adjective complementation errors. Learners can also access the lexical information in order to correct their input.
§ The speech synthesizer produces an oral output for any sentence.

We will finally present some of the tests run with our prototype, either on a learner corpus (Granger 2001), or during a validation phase currently under way with actual learners.

References
Granger S. (2001) FRIDA: French Interlanguage Database.
http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/cecl/Cecl?Projects/Frida/gateway.htm

The focus of this joint presentation is twofold: to establish the role and methodology of Web-based learning as it affects the LFTLs, and then to discuss evaluation criteria for assessing the effectiveness of these sites.
Part 1 includes an analysis of exemplary websites, with particular attention to the target audience, the learning objectives, the materials, the activities, and the availability/techniques of assessment. Part 2 continues this analysis by discussing criteria for evaluating Web-based LFTL sites. The presenters will demonstrate the use of a template which is intended for use by teachers and learners alike. The template addresses not only methodology and content but also such topics as site design and usability.

Because the numbers of students studying Russian in Finland are usually small, it has been difficult especially in small towns and remote areas to attract enough new students to form large enough study groups. Other problems include the heterogeneous groups and the lack of current and motivating teaching material. To solve such problems, the project utilizes the net for serving both students and teachers as the name of the project Setka implies (a Russian word for a net, a network or a string bag). Consequently, the main focus of the project is on studying Russian by using current and authentic Web-based teaching materials and offering a chance to study Russian on the Internet.

Co-ordinated by the Turku Adult Education Centre, the project currently centres on the following main areas:
§ Co-operative network of Russian teachers and their further education in CALL
§ Co-operation with Russian partners
§ Maintaining the Setka website
§ Cyrillic discussion forum to enable student interaction
§ Creating Web-based teaching materials for Russian studies
§ Developing Web-based Russian courses

In my presentation, I will first present the main idea and contents of the project and then show some examples of the Web-based materials created so far. I will also discuss the experiences gained during the project in using bulletin boards and discussion forums in achieving student interaction.

The Setka website: http://setka.tkukoulu.fi

The LondonMet e-packs are specially designed, interactive self-study materials
which are delivered online. They have been created to form an integral element of the London Metropolitan University's 'Open Language Programme', a national leader in IWLPs, which is characterised by the successful integration
of independent learning and taught classes across 10 different languages.
They have been specifically designed to provide students with feedback, both as
direct and delayed answers, and incorporate language learning tips, guidance (i.e. grammatical or cultural summaries), authentic practice through links to websites, and access to advisory help through email and other language support services.

This presentation will look at some of the major technological and design issues, such as choice of platform, general software, copyright, layout, visual and aural
stimulation. It will also cover issues of usability, navigation and the overall
'experience' of using online materials. There will be a demonstration of a variety of activity types.

This paper discusses the first stage of an on-going ethnographic study conducted in this elementary school in 2003. The study explores how children’s emerging literacies are being shaped by an evolving symbiosis of modern paper literacies and postmodern digital literacies. Epistemological questions about the nature of literacy in a postmodern society as well as pragmatic inquiries into the validity of contemporary language arts curricula, ESL four skills agendas, and modern era high stakes assessment practices are engaged through an exploration of Main Street School children’s emerging multiliteracies.

Granger, C., Morbey, M.L., Lotherington, H., Owston, R. & Wideman, H. (2002). Canada: Factors contributing to teachers’ successful implementation of information technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 18 (4), 480-488.
Lotherington, H., Morbey, M.L. Granger, C. & Doan, L. (2001). Tearing down the walls: New literacies and new horizons in the elementary school. In B. Barrell (Ed.), Technology, teaching and learning: Issues in the integration of technology (pp. 131-161). Calgary: Detselig.

The authoring tool used to demonstrate this diversity is IDIOMA-TIC, a tool for developing exercises and tests to improve the proficiency of people studying foreign languages at all levels. With IDIOMA-TIC, we generate a large number of exercise types, including a whole range of half-open questions. Our software is able to create and to correct translation exercises, correction exercises, rephrasing exercises, and, more recently, dictation exercises.

One of the main features of IDIOMA-TIC is its intelligent feedback options, proposing a corrective output that is maximally adapted to the concrete input by the learner. It is also possible to give error-specific feedback and to provide feedback at different stages (hints, local and generic feedback). Moreover, the learner can activate alternative solutions in a simple way. The first version of IDIOMA-TIC could only cope with small texts (sentences and whole paragraphs). However, the program has been redesigned in order to handle longer texts and multimedia components (images, video and audio files).

We will demonstrate how the tool can be used optimally on the basis of a whole battery of exercises composed for learners of French, English and German (or any other Western European language) at all levels of proficiency.
Technically, IDIOMA-TIC generates exercises or tests for stand-alone and Web applications. It consists of two modules: an input module based on an open database of the XML-type and a Shockwave engine that publishes the database in a browsable format.

The objective of this particular online course is for teachers to identify elements of assessment related to their context and requirements so that they may create a proposal which responds to a particular need they have identified within their teaching context. The design of the activities for this course is based on constructivist methodology, where we consider that the activities are centered on the students’ interests, promote interaction, and construction of meaning based on personal needs, interests and experience as well as feedback and meaningful exchanges with colleagues while also promoting autonomous learning.

It is of interest then to explore in detail several issues relating to interactivity and learner interaction in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the online instructional design. In essence, we need to measure how useful the approach we used was, if the moments and ways chosen for collaboration between students were appropriate, the value of online advising, the degree to which the organization of content helped students reach the course’s goals, and the extent to which the course represents some sort of innovation in contrast to traditional learner settings. The results presented which touch on the previous matters are based on a formal evaluation applied at the end of the course as well as records of participation and comments in e-mail, the forum, chat, the professional showcase, and personal working folders.

Currently fourteen languages are represented in the archive, with such themes as "Human Rights in Latin America" and "The Literature of Baja California." The DMA also contains practice items for oral testing, annotated regional and national literature, and discourse samples. A new online submission protocol enables collaborators world wide to share their work freely with others. Should the archive expand to e-commerce, authors or publishers who seek additional venues for distributing their materials might receive royalties or payments.

This presentation will review the DMA and other concurrent efforts in the U.S. to create and disseminate "webbable" digital media, incorporation of teaching and learning strategies as an integral part of the DMA project, issues of distribution of royalties in a digital environment, securing copyright-free materials, and tenure and promotion decisions related to digital scholarship. Documents shared as handouts include the Modern Language Association's Guidelines on Evaluating Dossiers for Tenure and selected publications of NINCH (National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage). Both organizations actively investigate the creation, preservation, evaluation, and distribution of digital media in the U.S.

The presenter will compare a traditional list of reading skills and strategies with his revised list that accommodates shifts in the reading process when applied to electronic text. The revised list advocates a more prominent role for previously ignored skills (e.g., juxtaposition), a de-emphasis on increasingly irrelevant skills (e.g., identification of topic sentences), and a new approach for certain skills (e.g., skimming) that are still important but have taken on additional roles in electronic environments. Rationales for the suggested revisions will be offered and illustrated with examples from the Internet.

The presenter will argue that it is still possible to label what we do on the World Wide Web as reading, as long as our revamped understanding of its component skills encompasses the processes employed by experienced readers of Web-based text. Questions and comments concerning the evolving nature of Internet reading and implications for language teaching will be encouraged.

It is intended to show :
(i) the positive impact on first year Irish language students by their
introduction to CALL in their second week at UL;
(ii) their early introduction to online facilities pertinent to their
courses in Irish, e.g.. spell check, dictionary, grammar and literature;
(iii) their being encouraged to produce some sentences, no matter how few or
meagre, on international forums.

Student feedback comes in their remarking with pride, in their essays and in
tutorials, on the relative abundance of Irish language sites on the Web.
From the academic year 2001-2002 to the present, CALL affecting Irish
language students at the University of Limerick has evolved from the initial
idea of trying to improve the view of students who come to Irish at UL
thinking along the lines of meeting the oldest written European literature
north of the Alps. The idea that they are 'doing a subject' rather than
embracing a language is quite common, particularly among non-native speakers who have not been schooled in an all-Irish immersion system.

Faced with a socio-linguistic situation which has coined for linguistics internationally the non-laudatory term 'irelandization', students views have to be dealt with if they are to adopt a healthy attitude to their own semi-public usage and commitment to their language. The earlier that they feel it necessary to progress behaviourally is imperative if they are to attain a
degree-standard command of the language. It is apparent from the essay feedback that the CALL sessions are having a positive effect on the students affirmation in having chosen Irish as their subject and on their pride in the respectable presence of Irish on the net. It may be added that there are now 88,000,000 words of Irish on the net (Nic Eoin, Máirín 2003).

While adopting this modern approach (see Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987), this study deals with the interactive editing EST samples written by Iranian academics at various universities. During the editing process, the two researchers came up with certain generalizations of writing inadequacies among which the discoursal features of a particular genre (Halliday and Hasan, 1995) seem to be of primary importance. The researchers are thus made to consider a continual interaction with the EST writers within a period of three months following a framework that tries to capture the recursive, not linear, nature of writing (Arndt's 1991).

The following problematic examples illustrate the nature of problems and the need for the interactive process-based approach to EST editing, and consequently, also to teaching writing:

1. "The comprehensive study of regularities dealing with natural resources changes' the basin of the Caspian Sea is the main objective of the geographical problem solution in the Caspian region."
2. "Strands generally contain sturn or left turns the numerical values of which are given nets and various lines as follows:"
3. "….its impact upon the coastal economy where a special place takes the oil complex (OC) production."

Here, the main editing task was carried out through mutual interactive negotiation where editors not familiar with the contexual genre (Swales, 1990; Halliday, 1991). Therefore, through mutual discussion, the editing process was successfully carried out.

In summary, this study shows how effectively an interactive process-based approach to EFL writing might lead to producing comprehensible output (see, Hewings and Hewings, 2001).

The aims of the teaching experiment were to find out: 1. How will the learning outcomes of the virtual group and the control group differ? 2. How will the students and the Department of Pharmacy respond to the different and new method, i.e. the virtual teaching method? The virtual exercises were written within the Internet authoring environment, TopClass via which the virtual students worked. The control group was taught the same material by the same teacher in a traditional classroom setting. Both groups took the same final test. Students in both groups were asked to evaluate the course using a 1 to 5 rating scale and they were also asked to assess their respective courses verbally. The research methods were: action research and quasi-experimental study (Cook & Campbell, 1979; Creswell, 1994).

A detailed analysis of the different aspects of the student feedback and learning results is given. Conclusions:
1. The virtual students learned pharmaceutical English relatively well but not significantly better than the classroom students.
2. The overall student satisfaction in the virtual pharmacy English reading comprehension group was found to be higher than that in the teacher-taught control group.
3. Virtual learning is easier for linguistically more able students; less able students need more time with the teacher.

The theoretical background of this project is situated in collaborative learning and training: the students worked in pairs, creating multimedia activities based on their culture for “real” students in a different location (inquiry based learning); the French students communicated between each other during weekly classes and using groupware (Quickplace). A triangulated data method was used incorporating: Students’ multimedia productions, questionnaires and semi-directive interviews.

We will discuss the following issues:
§ How such a project aids the acquisition of a basic computer literacy for future language teachers;
§ How motivational aspects are linked to “real-world” tasks;
§ Students’ attitudes towards their multimedia productions and the expected reaction from their Australian “audience”;
§ Peer collaboration in the classroom and using groupware.

Our experiment demonstrated that technology does not exist independently of the learning process but serves as a vehicle to help learners achieve their goals and assist their cognitive development.

Our project “le français en première ligne” was developed through close collaboration between researchers at the University of Besançon, France, the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines in Lyon and the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney.

The results of our efforts come together on the CLAWEB, our educational website. In spite of being developed by a small team of designers and teachers, the CLAWEB has been and still is a very successful project, with more than 1.3 million pages visited last year. In our presentation, we will show how we have been able to integrate several technologies, such as Flash, dynamic HTML and advanced QuickTime to build our Web-based CALL materials.

We are then going to compare two solutions for dealing with the need to monitor students' activities and assess their work on the Web, by analysing:
1. commercial Learning Management Systems (LMSs), and
2. integrated solutions which allow us to maintain a free-style, creative structure in our Web projects while combining communication, monitoring and scoring capabilities.

The main focus of the presentation is on the technical and pedagogical aspects of creating exploratory learning environments in CALL. To do this it discusses some of the ways in which the functionality of a software application like Authorware can be used to facilitate the creation of a language learning program consistent with general areas of consensus in applied linguistics & CALL, relating to course design, learner strategies, interactivity and feedback. While some commercially developed (and costly) MLEs (e.g. CAN8) can provide the language teacher with a readymade authoring shell, requiring limited technical skills, they are restrictive in terms of functionality to provide flexible interactions and or customizable feedback.

Authorware, although involving a more demanding learning curve, can be used to develop more complex methodologies. There is however a greater challenge to the designer, both technically and pedagogically, in moving away from directive type methodologies to the creation of more exploratory learning environments. Specifically then this presentation looks at ways in which many CALL type interactions including multiple choice questions, text entry tasks etc. can be designed to facilitate problem solving and hypotheses testing.

“Getting On with Political Russian” and “Economic Russian” are new CD ROMs aimed at expanding and consolidating the knowledge of political and economic vocabulary as well as improving discussion and presentation skills at intermediate / advanced level.

They consist of five units, each of which contains recorded extracts from Russian TV programmes covering important political and economic issues. A transcript, active vocabulary and a variety of linguistic exercises accompany each extract.

Materials are adapted to students’ needs in extending vocabulary, improving listening comprehension skills and developing the knowledge of the political scene and economic situation in Russia.

Three dimensions of learners’ vocabulary knowledge seem to be of particular significance to researchers interested in quantitative approaches to the study of second language vocabulary acquisition. These dimensions are:
§ the ability to understand a word’s meaning,
§ the ability to produce it in an elicitation task
§ the ability to use it in free uncontrolled production.

The starting point of the research is that ‘a collection of linguistic data….can be used as a means of verifying hypotheses about a language’ (D.Crystal,1991). As technological advances make the computerized storage and access of large quantities of information easier, so the potential for research has widened considerably. In fact corpora can help in studying language and in reaching a communicative competence, especially referred to a lexical competence derived from the knowledge of Greek, Italian and English compound nouns.

A list of words will be provided as an example of a hypothesis about standard language deriving from old Greek. It could represent the core of a curriculum of a secondary school student regarding an English sectorial or microlanguage program. In the paper we first discuss several linguistic, pedagogic and practical issues we faced in the selection and preparation of texts, then outline the steps in the students’ training. We conclude with some observations on the strategies students employ in arriving at successful outcomes from corpus use and the obstacles and pitfalls they encounter, with a view to improving both our training methods and our overall approach to the use of corpora in teaching.

The system demonstrated in this session, ‘E-RAM’ (an Electronic Resource for task design using Authentic Materials), can be used with a range of authentic media/genres; newspapers, advertisements, broadcasting, literature, songs, films and the Web. It allows the teacher-user to ‘describe’ their selected authentic text to the model, in terms of its discourse type and communicative purpose. The system then generates one or more learning task/s suited to the text as described, offering step-by-step instructions for classroom implementation. The prototype has been through the initial piloting stage and is undergoing revision for publication in late 2003/4.

The question posed in this paper is whether the language pedagogies used with ICT preserve their authenticity such that they retain the perceived learning benefits of using authentic texts and interactions. To address this, the authenticity of the pedagogies used with three of the main ICT applications used in language learning, the Web, electronic mail and corpora, are considered with regard to the learning materials/texts used, the interactions undertaken, and learners perceptions/attitudes to both the texts and methods.

Among the conclusions of this paper are that authenticity has attained a new and unique perspective in the light of the advent of ICT, that ICT has helped make authenticity increasingly a factor of interaction and involvement, that the authenticity of this environment furthers the acquisition of language skills and electronic literacy and, finally, that the user-learner has come to play a central role in the process of authentication.

In this paper, the exploitation of language corpora is proposed in order to arrive at authentic teaching materials which facilitate the comprehension of German modal particles. The approach is twofold: in a first step, the frequency of those word forms which may function as modal particles was established. In the second step, concordance data of the more frequently occurring particles were analysed qualitatively. Teaching materials based on these analyses were developed, based on patterns of use which can be relayed to language learners in order to provide them with tools for the decoding of particle meaning.

The materials proposed in the present study aim at engaging the language learner with the meanings of particles in context. Rather than being given an explanation of a list of different particle meanings, learners are encouraged to explore these meanings and to recognise categories of meaning and the accompanying grammatical and lexical collocations. The teaching materials were implemented with Australian tertiary students of German at an upper intermediate to advanced proficiency level. Their responses to the explorative learning tasks were assembled in the form of questionnaires and taped focus-group discussions. These data were evaluated qualitatively and findings are discussed in this paper with a view to data-driven learning (e.g. Johns & King 1991) in a university foreign language curriculum.

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

Four groups of learners were given paper copies and electronic versions of English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionaries:
1. A hand held translation machine with a built-in Oxford dictionary was given to Chinese engineering students. They had just arrived from China and needed to improve upon their English.
2. A more sophisticated electronic dictionary with a specialized computer programming vocabulary card was given to another group of Chinese students studying to be engineers at a community college.
3. A CD ROM dictionary was given to university educated Chinese students who had great difficulties with conversational English. 4) A CD ROM dictionary was given to a Chinese student who is an English specialist taking courses at the Masters' level.

Students were free to access the electronic dictionaries whenever they felt a need for clarification while doing their coursework. All such uses were entered into a table with participants' comments on various points including their perceived need for using the instrument and whether their search was successful. A number of very interesting strategies was uncovered in meaning-making. Not only did students use decoding strategies, self-directed encoding also showed creative use of language.

We will give examples showing advantages and disadvantages of the use of computer technologies in learner language development especially in a collaborative setting where two people work together.

"Study2000" is an easy-to-use authoring tool, consisting of a compiler, which transfers the content in a virtual learning environment and an editor to create complex tasks. The original source for the compiler could be something as simple as a word document. The fact that no specialist computer skills are necessary to use the tool, was regarded as an important criterion selecting the software because the majority of module authors, i.e. usually the lecturers themselves, are not programming specialists.

The modules are based on two different teaching and learning paradigms, depending on the specific aims and objectives One is an overall instruction based approach where teaching mainly means instructing the learners, the second one is a mainly constructivist scenario where learners themselves acquire their knowledge by self determined actions.

The proposed talk will deal with examples of both teaching approaches, considering the respective teaching and learning methods, the position of the teachers, the content of the modules (fixed, determined by the teacher vs. open, determined by the learners) and the respective assessment criteria.

In this talk I will present different models of combining physical and digital resources to meet our learners’ needs and expectations. On the basis of this experience with university students and teachers I will illustrate the following points:
§ Design: Pedagogical aspects in curriculum and course design (taking into account Chapelle’s (2001) criteria for task appropriateness and the high significance of information literacy acquisition)
§ Implementation of different models of blended learning in courses offered by Jobline LMU
§ Evaluation/feedback: Student and teacher/tutor participation, motivation and feedback to working with a blended learning approach

The programme has run successfully for 2 years at Munich University and other educational institutions at tertiary level. It involved a high number of students and teachers. URL: www.jobline.lmu.de

To help learners to become familiar with the terminology, several grammatical computer games have been developed. The presentation will focus on these games and will include the following points:
1. Why computer games?
§ Learner background and learner needs
2. What kind of computer games?
§ A short presentation of 3 computer games on Arabic grammatical terminology
3. The theoretical framework
§ What are the learning theories supporting the computer games in ArabVISL?
4. How do computer games influence the learner's grammar?
§ How can computer games enhance the learner's declarative knowledge of grammar?
§ Does the learner's declarative knowledge of grammar influence the procedural skills?
5. How does the effect of the computer games relate to the overall purposes of ArabVISL?

Until the academic year 2000, the presenter and his colleague gave the necessary instruction using a manual provided by the university computer center. However, the manual was not quite appropriate to the use in language classes, because it focused on computer and software operation rather than media literacy and language learning. Commercially published instruction books were not designed for language classes either. Therefore, we decided to create our own. As we had already created various handouts for specific types of instruction, the composition of the booklet was not difficult.
We made sure that our version was “operating system-free”, so that students can use the book in another computer environment, such as at home. Instead, we tried to concentrate on using computers and network resources for language learning. We also included instructions in composing good e-mail messages, and acquiring appropriate media literacy and proper demeanor in communication. The result was a handy 50-page booklet; “Media Literacy for College Students” priced at $1.00.

The effective exploitation of corpora in language learning is, in most cases, only basic because of the complexity of information contained in a given corpus, and there is a lot of redundancy in the material presented to learners. In addition, there is little evidence of reusability, which means that the considerable effort which goes into sourcing data is largely unrewarded. And with the generalised use of the Internet as a source of information for all kinds of language-related material, the situation is bound to get worse unless the information collated is managed in some way.

In this paper, we argue that knowledge and use of traditional database technology can significantly enhance language teaching by providing greater control over the corpus resources available to the teacher, and at the same time enabling greater flexibility, diversity and variation in the material presented to the learner.

Using sample material from the BNC and the Internet, we demonstrate the richness of this data when viewed from a database perspective and outline some of the ways in which the data can be structured for flexible, diversified access in a CALL environment.

During the fall semester in 2002, we launched a TOEIC project using mobile phone technology and collected feedback from the participants. Approximately 140 students were monitored using their personal mobile phones as a language-learning tool for the period of 2 months. Students were given 20 TOEIC grammar questions both as a pre-test and a post-test together with questionnaires.

In this project, about 3 to 4 TOEIC grammar questions were sent to each mobile phone every day. Students could have access to those questions for learning TOEIC grammar. We got feedback from about 140 students in order to analyze how the students made progresses in the test of TOEIC grammar questions and overall students’ behavior about when and how they used the mobile phones in learning TOEIC grammar points. The detailed test results and analyses of questionnaires with learning strategies will be shown in this presentation.

With the permission of the publishers, the exercises have been made available on the campus network of the Tezukayama University, Japan. They have been used in classes since April, 2002 by two other teachers in addition to the proposer, and have been very popular with students. Interactivity is made as intuitive as possible, with the emphasis on dragging text rather than clicking. Even buildings and people can be dragged around street maps. Colour-coded visual feedback is provided in text rearrangement exercises, where words or phrases in the correct position turn green, while mistaken ones are red. In type-in exercises, feedback is provided at the level of individual letters, again red/green coded. But a much more effective way than reading about it to grasp the features of the material is to try it out. Examples of the exercises may be accessed at http://www.mcn.ac.jp/fa/m.obrien/priv/flash1

The proposed demonstration would involve showing these exercises in action, drawing attention to interesting features, outlining how they were made in Flash, and commenting on their use in practice, including the results of a questionnaire to the students.

Based on the modern approach to cultural studies, this paper offers an overview of an online course of Irish Landeskunde developed at the University of Essen as part of the Linguistics Online project (www.linguistics-online.de) and investigates what contribution the online components contributed to the development of the learners’ intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997). The course blended online modules containing content on modern Irish society with a discussion board exchange with Irish students, thereby providing the German learners with a combination of factual information and multiple perspectives on this information.

Results of qualitative research carried out during the course identifies some of the factors which affect the development of intercultural communicative competence in online learning environments. The data suggests that in order for online culture learning to be productive and successful, it is necessary for learners to broaden their definition of what they understand as culture. Secondly, instruction should focus more on the development of the skills of interaction and analysis which will enable learners to engage in ethnographic research (Beers, 2001; Roberts et al., 2001) and thereby become more aware of how the target culture is seen from the perspective of members of that culture. The often neglected role of the teacher in such online learning scenarios will also be given attention.

Outline of the Presentation
Background: Intercultural Learning and CALL in the literature
Background: Details of Online course analysed here
Findings of qualitative data
Developing techniques of investigation and analysis in learners
The Role of Teacher in online intercultural Learning

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details..

Free Chat enables users to engage in synchronous communication across an intranet. The downloaded package consists of both Web server and chat servlet programs, thus eliminating the need for separate downloading and installation of these components. Free Chat only needs to be installed once, on a PC that thereafter functions as a server. Client PCs access the server through their Internet browsers. The user interface is an HTML page containing an applet. User interaction is handled by the applet via buttons, hyperlinks and text fields.

Because Free Chat uses Java Server Pages technology, the machine on which it is installed will also have to run the Java Development Kit (JDK). Instructions for downloading and installing the JDK will be provided. Parameters in Free Chat’s configuration file govern the operation of the chat room. The procedure for modifying these will be demonstrated. It is also possible to customise part of the user interface – for example, by adding institutional logos and welcome messages in appropriate languages. The necessary HTML scripting will be presented.

The presentation will conclude with some general observations about the pedagogical possibilities offered by the chat room mode, with reference to chat room interaction that was organised in the Language Centre at Maynooth.

The E-Mail Dialogue project was a joint effort by the Pedagogical Department of the University in Usti nad Labem (Czech Republic) and the Philological Department of Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (St. Petersburg, Russia.) The main goals were to build cultural linkages between the students of Russia and the Czech Republic by using the media of electronic communication and to build a bridge of understanding and learning between contemporaries from different cultures.

In terms of academic objectives, the project was aimed at the following goals:

1. To enhance the language competence of prospective teachers of English by providing them with an extra opportunity to use the knowledge and skills, gained in class, in the process of intense communication with their contemporaries in another country;

2. To learn about the differences and similarities that exist in their respective educational systems in both countries;

3. To develop students' confidence in implementing computer skills.

Despite the difficulties encountered, (technical, cross-cultural, interpersonal) the moderators of the project found it extremely rewarding for both sides. The project organizers are planning on making it a three-sided project. They would like to invite students from other academic institutions to participate in the project.

This paper presents data from a study based on the spontaneous interactions of tandem (i.e., alternating NS/NNS) partners during a weekly, term-long real-time exchange based in a MOO (Multi-User Domain, Object-Oriented). The theoretical background is, first, a novel model of instructed second-language acquisition that emphasises the importance of metalinguistic awareness, and second, the hypothesis mentioned above: that real-time text-based communication affords a variety of opportunities for a metalinguistic focus. Accordingly, I examine utterances and exchanges that indicate and/or give rise to this focus: negotiation of meaning, self-repair, and native-speaker feedback of various kinds, including other-correction.

The methodology is focused description along a variety of parameters (e.g., speaker language, level of linguistic analysis, nature of failure signals and responses), with a more qualitative dimension being introduced in the form of introspective data elicited in online interviews. The data presented will include extracts from actual MOO transcripts as exemplars, and quantitative summaries of the various aspects of interaction dealt with. Tentative conclusions are drawn regarding the influence of the medium and of the pedagogical framework on metalinguistic focus.

The module is designed for first year undergraduate students, who practise both language specific skills (such as grammar learning processes, vocabulary acquisition, translation, reading and listening) and more generic skills (such as library navigation, information retrieval, and presentation skills) in it. The module is delivered face-to-face, but is also supported by the online learning environment WebCT. The assessment includes a reflective portfolio in electronic format, based upon the European Language Portfolio.

The paper will illustrate how the use of WebCT allowed for the development of new exercises that developed both ICT skills and language specific skills. It will also highlight the fact that network-based learning can be conducive to the creation of a lively learning community, where staff and students alike have the chance to reflect upon the learning process.

On a less positive note, the research also confirmed the strong resistance that some students have towards the whole area of literacy. Many students dislike the heuristic approach required to stimulate ‘deep learning’. Also, while in the past ICT had some kind of ‘novelty’ value in language learning, these days students also show signs of a certain fatigue towards computers.

The paper will conclude by summarising the actions agreed by staff and students to improve the module for academic year 2003-2004 in view of the feedback obtained in 2002-2003.

A challenging SL learning issue is whether and to what extent to use the learners’ first language, particularly when the learners come from different cultures and share no common language to communicate with their instructor or among themselves. To address this issue, virtual role-playing has been utilized with a very positive effect.

The main assumption is that, if the learners are literate, the task is to facilitate their immersion into a different mode of communication, the new language. The virtual stage spurs the learners’ natural desire to broaden their communicative ability and minimizes the frustration of communication failures.

The abundant use of multimedia facilitates this by drawing the learners into roles in games they can feel, understand and experience. From infancy to old age, human beings enjoy playing games, in real life as well as in virtual environments. Through acting in life experience, people acquire language, the tool that captures experience and, as a virtual embodiment of experience, serves as a bridge between the real and the virtual. In virtual role-playing, online interaction with real as well as virtual “actors” broadens the spectrum of experience and thus enhances and enriches language development.

Of course, much depends on the setting of the stage, as well as on how the facilitator pulls the strings. In the cases to be reported on in detail in this paper, an effort will be made to analyse the specific issues that arise in the setup of the virtual stage, as well as to assess the impact and the enthusiastic reception observed so far.

English Coach 3D is the third generation of language software designed by the Cornelsen Verlag to accompany a school English course for German children. The advantage of a three dimensional environment is that it motivates learners to play with language in order to build an enchanting universe. The new Coach provides four separate worlds to explore each of the four skills, purposefully moving the emphasis away from conventional drilling and testing to an awareness of all aspects of language use. There are two further worlds, one for learning learning strategies and one with an integrative approach to grammar and vocabulary acquisition. The latter makes use of innovative discovery activities.

As learners explore the six worlds, they encounter a variety of characters, such as Ronja Reader and Earnie the Ear, who act and react in intriguing ways, encouraging learners to investigate their surroundings, or to enter learning stations which offer novel “new-literacy” approaches to each of the four skills. Many activities are not goal-oriented in the way that traditional learning tasks are, but encourage language exploration, rather than task completion. Instead of earning points for their explorative activities, learners acquire the power to transform their worlds with colour, to stick up posters, to animate stationary objects.

Each of the worlds is slowly transformed to reflect the developing competence of the user in a particular skill. There are “Reading Soaps”, “Writer's Corners”, “Conversation Makers”, and a myriad of people and places which provide new skill-specific challenges. English Coach has been planned so that each skill is systematically developed and taught using the appropriate resources of the new media for that skill. English Coach 3D is envisaged as the precursor of a new generation of language course where electronic and print media become fully integrated.

Some 670 0000 Finns study at adult education institutes all around Finland every year. Mainly funded by their local municipalities, these 257 institutes offer an extensive range of courses which are usually taught in the evenings. Most of the students attend courses that suit their special interests which may range from handicrafts to political history, language courses being the most popular courses among adult learners.

However, very little has been done to provide adult students with the necessary help in the form of study guidance. In our poster we will introduce a Web-based guide for adults planning to study at an adult education institute. The structure and contents of the “OpinOpas” study guide have been devised and designed by a team representing six Finnish adult education institutes. The idea for developing the guide emerged and its first version was drawn up during an ICT teacher training course organised by KTOL- the Finnish Association of Adult Education Centres (www.ktol.fi ) and the Helsinki School of Economics in 2001.

The OpinOpas study guide (www.opinopas.net) presents the courses offered at the Finnish adult education institutes including the links to their home pages of the institutes. The guide offers useful tips on how to plan one’s studies, study techniques and ways to monitor and assess one’s own learning. Detailed guidance is offered in some specific areas such as language and computer studies. In our poster we will specifically focus on how the OpinOpas study guide is being used in the counselling of language teaching and learning and curriculum planning.

Corpora generated from broadcast speech are a rich source of authentic language input for language learners. Teachers and learners have sought broadcast news material from audio and video to supplement language acquisition and maintenance (for any instructional level) but the challenge in using video is the time required to locate and preview video sources, and then to prepare engaging instructional activities. Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) in Broadcast News has made significant progress with word error rates ranging between 15-25% (Colbath et al, 2000) and current speech and human language technologies make it possible to automate the capture, transcription, and indexing of audio and video sources to construct an archive of easily searchable, authentic language resources for use in various language learning settings.

In the past years, ASR has been used to help learners improve pronunciation (LaRocca et al., 1999; Rypa & Price, 1999; Dalby & Kewley-Port, 1999), assisting children learning to read (Mostow & Aist, 1999), and supporting virtual dialogs or speech-interactive environments (Bernstein et al., 1999; Holland et al., 1999; Harless et al., 1999, Egan 1999). This proposal suggests extending the use of ASR and finding new teaching, learning and research applications. Egan proposed and demonstrated at CALICO (2002) how these technologies have been used and could be used in the CALL environment.

The paper will elaborate on how existing ASR technologies, enhanced with natural language processing and statistical text analysis algorithms, can not only assist in materials development, but may also prove valuable for:
1. determining the difficulty level of audio and video resources for language learners,
2. finding resources at an optimal difficulty level for individual learners,
3. building native language corpora,
4. providing a mechanism for applied linguistic researchers to search automatically and manually transcribed learner corpora as a preliminary step to further analysis.

Much recent educational theory strongly favours collaborative learning – “the creation of shared goals, shared exploration, and a shared process of meaning-making” (Palloff & Pratt 2001), with “dialogue as the fundamental way of inquiry” (Christiansen & Dirckinck-Holmfeld 1995). This is seen as leading to development of “creativity, problem solving, analysis, or evaluation” (Bates 2000), in other words the higher-level cognitive skills (cf. Bloom’s 1956 typology). Such collaboration goes hand in hand with issues of learner empowerment and learner-centredness (eg. Race and Brown 1995; Tudor 1996), and both principles seem ideally suited to realisation within the online environment (eg. Mason & Kaye 1989; Belanger and Jordan 2000).

In the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Dundee, we have run both German and Spanish Language Diploma courses online since 1999. We have, however, discovered that despite a design model that encourages collaboration, a number of students have opted for an individualistic, isolated approach, enthusiastically doing their own work but preferring not to engage in group or paired activities. Surveys and discussions have suggested possible reasons, connected largely with the self-perceptions and learning styles of those signing up for such courses.

We are about to launch a new course, Teaching Modern Languages to Adults, which does not aim to teach a language as such, but rather to expose language teachers to current pedagogical theories and practices. Given the nature of the course, we believe it is absolutely essential to follow current pedagogical trends in establishing a collaborative, dialogue-based environment of “highly synergistic and interactive learning patterns” (Harasim 1989). Because of previous experiences, and because of the international market for the course – which means students may have very different cultural expectations of our teaching styles – we are taking steps to ensure that all students engage in collaborative learning.

This paper will explore the reasons for the rejection of collaborative modes by some previous students, our reasons for following current thinking on co-operative learning, and ways in which we have sought to solidly establish the collaborative nature of the new course. Topics covered will include synchronous and asynchronous modalities, and the use of group and peer assessment. We will report on the success or otherwise of these methods, and make suggestions for further reflection and development.

The purpose of our Show and Tell presentation is to introduce two Web-based Swedish courses developed for Finnish university students. Although separate courses run in their respective universities, the courses share the same course rationale and course format. This format enables the students to integrate their own expertise in their major subjects into developing their language skills.

In our presentation, we would like to argue that while the teacher is the language expert, the students´ expertise in their own special fields can be a great resource. In accordance with the rationale drawing on collaboration and interaction, all students benefit from the shared expert knowledge while at the same time they can practise and improve their language skills.

The use of a Web-based course authoring system makes it easier to tailor courses for the students as it is possible to take into consideration not only the students´ diversified fields of study but also their different backgrounds and professional language requirements.

We will first demonstrate two courses in which we have utilized this course format: one delivered in the University of Helsinki (WebCT platform) and the other at the Helsinki School of Economics (Optima platform). The students at the Helsinki University were social science majors, majoring in such subjects as political science, sociology and economics. The special fields of the business students at the Helsinki School of Economics included finance, e-commerce and business law. The Web-based course platform was in use all through the seven-week courses. The students also had face-to-face group sessions.

In conclusion, we will discuss the students’ learning outcomes achieved during the courses.

The introduction of the new technologies in education radically and deeply changes the understanding of literacy. What is literacy today if it does not develop our capabilities of analyzing and organizing data, if it does not increase our capacities in the well-informed society? The Internet is not only a great means of communication that changes its different modes, but functions as the biggest library possible as well. Until recently the opportunities that the Internet offers existed only in the imagination. It is also an inexhaustible mine of information. All this calls for a re-interpretation of language teaching paradigms. The specific character of communication on the Internet creates new peculiarities of the basic receptive (listening and reading) and productive (speaking and writing) skills.

Our paper concentrates on research of the chat and e-mails of 13 - 14 year-old pupils (the last two years of the basic education in Bulgaria, the 7th and 8th grade accordingly). The objective of the research project is to work out modern techniques for development of communicative skills (receptive and productive) in the conditions of the communication on the Internet (a new literacy). This aim is made concrete through the following tasks: (i) to analyse the specific features of the chat and e-mails as an intermediate form between traditional written and spoken discourses; (ii) to compare this intermediate form to oral and written corpora; (iii) to establish the peculiarities of the language structures in communication in Bulgarian and English in both the chat and e-mails; (iv) to develop modern techniques for communication in different life situations in the process of the formation of new literacy and rules as well as of the knowledge society. With the implementation of such techniques, conditions are created to re-formulate and re-interpret the current teaching paradigms aiming at the development of speech competencies.

A handout will be provided with bibliographical details.

This work in progress is part of a virtual learning course carried out at the University of Granada and entitled ADELEX-Assessing and developing lexical competence on the Internet. Taking into account the latest linguistic, psycholinguistic and methodological theories, ADELEX has been designed to improve lexical competence of university students through the Web and comprises a set of Web-based activities oriented to enlarge and reinforce vocabulary.

Our presentation will expose a set of specific strategies designed to enhance lexical competence throughout that program. These strategies take advantage of reference resources (dictionaries and lexical databases) to implement the so-called webquests. Using the Internet as main source of information, the webquest model, offer a new type of learning, closely related to the well-known project work. Nevertheless, learning through the Web or webquests is not an easy task and need careful preparation and control on part of the teacher. In doing so, process design, as one of the modules of a webquest, constitutes a main step. Taking these points into account, our contribution will discuss some ways of introducing reference materials, especially online dictionaries, as scaffolding for the design of some specific webquests aimed at developing reading skills.

Dictionaries are key elements in foreign language learning, especially in reading comprehension, as many researchers have supported. As tools of learning, dictionaries provide all the information students need to tackle their main linguistics problems while reading. Thus, they are probably one of the best tools to support reading activities trough the Web. In sum, this presentation aims to offer a model of webquest for languages focusing on the design of the scaffolding elements, and particularly on online dictionaries and lexical databases. Several examples will support this session and we will share some of the primary conclusions of this work in progress.

Computer Assisted Learning (CAL), using multimedia technology, has been driven by the rapid development of Computer Science in all fields related to teaching and learning. We, as both researchers and teachers, consider CAL not as a substitute of traditional instruction but as a support, which leads to self-learning.

We have to take into account that any online resource should be able to motivate the students and facilitate active and individual learning. It has to capture the students’ attention in the same way as a teacher would do in the case of a traditional course where the teacher is actually the center of the instruction process. We consider computers as a tool for learning much more than a mere aid in the instruction process.

We would like to emphasize that although self-learning is a key application it is not the only one. Using the computer as a tool in a classroom must be seen as an aid for the learning process much more than a substitute of the teacher. Its use must lead us to more individualized attention – for instances in cases in which the large number of students per class can interrupt or block the acquisition or consolidation of a second language. Thus the teacher is given an opportunity to pay individual attention to the students during their learning process.

The use of computers lets the teacher experiment with the available technology, developing new materials, multimedia activities, integrating traditional media with innovative ones to fit the students’ needs. There are many advantages to take into account when using interactive techniques among which the following could be mentioned:
§ Learning time shortens
§ Student’s attention increases
§ Knowledge retention increases
§ The student takes an active part in the learning process

In these last few years Information Technology (IT) developed different kinds of multimedia and interactive tools which aimed to entertain, amuse, inform people and promote new abilities and a shared knowledge. This new evolutional process has had both positive and negative effects on learning and teaching functions. In fact, as regards Italian teenagers, learning English as a second language, and Italian teachers, it is possible to draw a very complex profile. Learners are more and more involved in technological tools which guide them towards a global knowledge, but on the other hand the “old” text books or face-to-face lessons seems to be boring and not useful. Teachers are actually living a kind of “nightmare”, in that their books, cassette records and CD-ROMs are not enough to stimulate language teaching work in or outside a classroom.

This work aims to show in a very simple way how chat and e-mails, as technological tools, can be used to make an interesting and “cool” language lesson passing through the four basic traditional skills (writing, speaking, listening and reading), taking care of both learner expectations and learner strategies, and considering an appropriate teaching methodology.

Over the past decade, technology has rapidly changed the face of classrooms. Students nowadays are exposed to a variety of new media, from computer-assisted learning programs to the Internet, email and chat rooms. As these technological innovations have invaded the classroom, learners have reacted in different ways. Some have ignored the new advances completely, others have spent countless hours at the computer lab, and still others, probably the majority, have done the required minimum and left the door open for future changes.

In an effort to understand more clearly the impact of technology on the second language learner, this paper will present results obtained from university learners of French and English as a second language. The purpose of this research is twofold: 1) to discover the extent to which language learners are incorporating computers into their language learning 2) to find out what attitudes learners have towards the use of computers in language learning.

Results indicate a correlation between the self-reported rating of computer skills and the attitudes of the students. Furthermore, data shows that students who use the computer laboratory feel more comfortable using the technology but also judge that using the technology makes them better language learners.

Recognizing the importance of technology for the language learner introduces a new dimension in the teaching of a language. The language teacher must now incorporate this new media in the language classroom. Implications for the language classroom will be discussed.

We describe a recent project to build an interactive Web-based environment for learning the international language Esperanto. Assuming only basic literacy in some standard national language on the part of the learner, we set out to design a site (www.lernu.net) that would offer the greatest possible range of aids to language learning. These include extensive multilingualism; instant messaging among learners, tutors and assistants; instantly accessible dictionary and grammar tools; explanations of the philosophy and history behind the language, and of possible strategies for language learning; courses for different levels of ability using a variety of language-teaching methods; and multiple opportunities for user feedback.
As well as demonstrating the site itself, we will use data from its first eight months of operation to evaluate the success of these various features and discuss their implications for CALL design in international/intercultural settings. This site is being used for individual and distance language learning as well as lessons in more traditional language classes.

Presentation outline
We plan to use Power Point and a live demonstration of the website.
The presentation will consist of:
1. An overview of the website
2. Commentary on the methods we have used
3. Presentation of the evaluation process and its results to date
4. Conclusions and plans for the future
5. Discussion

The show and tell presentation reports on the teacher and student experiences and outcomes of a university-level course where independent language learning skills development and academic writing (in English) for students of non-language subjects were integrated together and offered on the Optima Discendum platform. Contact tutorials were held to build community between course participants and peer groups and to ensure flexible use of the platform.

Students analysed and reflected upon their personal language learning preferences and styles, goals, priorities and existing skills (Common European Framework criteria) with the help of a self-access module available in the Centre’s new electronic learning space. They also assessed their proficiency level in the language they chose themselves and engaged in a self-directed language learning project either alone, with a partner, or in a small group with similar aims.

Four written assignments based on self-assessments and analyses, as well as background materials, and representing different forms of academic writing in English were done during the course: an essay on language learning beliefs, a research paper on language learning styles and strategies, an evaluative report on a net search into Internet-based materials in the language or skill chosen, and a review and diary of their experiences of the learning project.

The written work was peer reviewed and edited on the platform, and teacher guidance and feedback was given in both tutorials and in online form. The experiment was part of the departmental action research and development project in promoting learner and teacher autonomy and integrating ICT-enhanced approaches to language teaching and learning at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre.

The lack of interactivity in current language learning and teaching software is not only a mere result of the lack of technical options. A similarly important factor is the lack of non-linear teaching concepts, and as result thereof, the lack of non-linear interactive texts in curricula and syllabi. Some avant-garde programs such as A la rencontre de Philippe, Dans un quartier de Paris and Berliner Sehen and “experiments” such as many losely structured internet language learning resources have demonstrated both the possibilities and limitations of the use of more open (non-linear and interactive) text resources.

Some of the major issues facing those approaches are a. the learner’s need for a certain (mostly advanced) linguistic competency level, b. the learner’s need for particular learning attitudes, goals and strategies (e.g. independent learning), c. the need for the program to remain current in terms of technology and contents and d. (at least in the case of the development of programs) the need for developers to have access to significant financial resources.

Using interactive texts such as hyperfiction in language teaching and learning may not only help alleviate the problems in a number of ways but also contribute a number of pedagogical benefits. Hyperfiction:

§ fulfils the criterion of authenticity in the sense of modern communicative approaches to language learning and teaching
§ is generated through the new media and not just projected on them as so many current teaching and learning resources; it is “media-adequate” and therefore fosters the development of new literacies
§ constitutes a truly interactive (literary) genre and therefore ideally addresses the requirements of modern language pedagogy and learning psychology
§ fosters exploratory skills as outlined in constructivist (and constructionist) learning theories and reader-response criticism
§ lends itself for interfaces to instructionist learning and teaching elements therefore allowing access for learners of different competency levels and reducing the risk of getting lost in cyberspace
§ is readily available.

The paper discusses the role of hyperfiction in developing new literacies and it illustrates the processes involved using materials from a chapter of the new online-programme uni-deutsch.de.

Achieving interactivity in language learning software remains one of the greatest challenges of software designers and authors. The rather narrow (purely technical) application of “interactivitiy” in the design of software has led to a resurgence of older teaching methods but has not fully proven to produce an added value to language learning. The addition of communication channels provided by chat, e-mail and board functions is a more recent attempt at remedying the lack of interactivity in the software of “closed programs”. It has also contributed to the development of more complex e-learning platforms.

However, while there are a great number of such platforms of various scope and functionality, only very few of the current platforms can even attempt to address the particularly wide range of needs for interactivity in language learning. Teaching and learning, that is transferring knowledge in, both contents and code (language) presents a double challenge. With the development of a new e-learning platform in the context of a large EU-supported project those particular needs for interactivity and learner interaction are being addressed.

The new e-platform contains a number of complex functions which allow learners and instructors to interact with or among each other on various levels of spoken and written language. Next to several communication channels in adapted chat, voice-chat, e-mail, voice-mail, forum and Web-meeting modes the platform also allows the generation and recording of lectures of various lengths, such as explanations and animations of grammar or any other presentations.

Such presentations can be transmitted in real-time or as a recorded resource from a databank. They can be accompanied by integrated real-time communication functions which allow the instructor/tutor to interact with their students while prerecorded teaching segments are running. The complexity and flexibility of the databank which may contain any kind of text, audio or video source allows for electronically mediated interactive language classes comparable to real face-to-face interaction. In addition, the ease of access to teaching and learning resources surpasses current possibilities by far. The pedagogical and technical parameters of this platform will be presented and demonstrated.

This paper describes a research tool for investigating L2 reading strategies and learning autonomy on the www. The tool consists of a Web-quest, in which students navigate through different pages on the Web in order to complete a task. The design of this task brings together theories of second language teaching, such as constructivism (Felix 2002, Newby et al. 1996); new definitions of literacy (New London Group 1996; Kern & Warschauer 2000); the role of learning autonomy in language learning (Benson & Voller 1997) and learning strategies (Cohen 1998).

The aim of the task is to provide students with an online tool that guides their navigation on the Web whilst eliciting new strategies specific to the medium. Results of a first pilot study, as well as a larger quantitative and qualitative research trial of the tool with intermediate Spanish students at the Open University, will be discussed.

Cohen A.D. (1998). Strategies in learning and using a second language. Longman, London.
Felix, U. (2002): The Web as a vehicle for constructivist approaches in language teaching. ReCALL, 14 (1): 2-15. CUP.
Kern, R. and Warschauer, M. (2000): Introduction: Theory and practice of networked-based language teaching, in M. Warschauer and R. Kern (eds.): Networked-based language teaching: Concepts and practice. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Benson, P. and Voller, P. (1996) (eds.): Autonomy and independence in language learning. Longman, London.
The New London Group (1996) A pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 46 (1): 60-92.

One of the most common uses of the World Wide Web for foreign language learning is as a resource for essay topics. When we as language tutors ask students to perform searches for information about a given issue we assume that students:

- know how to perform those searches
- like using the Web
- pay attention to the language

It is essential that these assumptions are examined and researched. There is a need to know what the relationship between learners and the Web is: what processes are involved, how the students go about the search process and what their perceptions of the Web are.

To provide an attempt at researching these issues, a study was set up. The aim of this study was to obtain data on how Foreign Language Higher Education students interact with the Web in general and in the context of a search for content/reading task in particular. Our goal was to produce a descriptive snapshot of student impressions and abilities at one given moment. For this purpose 198 students of Spanish at the University of Southampton were asked how they use the Web, what for, how they go about finding the information they need, what they perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of using the Web as a research tool for language learning, to compare it to other resources and what their attitudes towards it are. In addition, the process of searching for information was observed with a number of students.
In this paper we will present the details of the project, the results of the study and discuss those results.

Today, continuous, rapid change regularly redefines the nature of literacy (Leu, in press) and - from a transactional perspective - technology and literacy influence each other in multiple ways (Bruce, 1997b; Haas, 1996; Garton & Wellman, 1995). This means that technology may transform literacy but literacy may also transact with and transform technology. Emerging technologies are often modified or further developed by users who create websites and programs for teaching and learning. Based on the view that there is mutual transaction between technology, FL literacy and area content, two multilingual CALL projects at the design stage will be evaluated and compared in this paper. Both projects aim to provide Web-based courses simultaneously in up to five foreign languages.

During the design phase it was established that the nature of the course content, the provision of multiple languages and the international co-operation between project partners were to influence the technical implementation to a large extent. Existing authoring tools could not be used or needed some considerable modification. Therefore, the formative evaluation (PLUM and TELL, 1996) of the projects had to include the design and development of templates/tools for authors/teachers as well as the design of the area content deployed together with the methods of FL instruction. With reference to a number of evaluation methods (Ehlers, 2001; Boyle, 1997; Götz & Häffner, 1992; TELL consortium, 1993), a questionnaire and an evaluation checklist were designed for authors and end users in six European countries to obtain constructive feedback that would help the technical teams in the further development of the programs.

The results of the study will be discussed in this paper. Particular attention will be paid to transactions between content and technology regarding the provision of multilingual materials. Questions of sustainability and transferability will also be raised in this context.

This poster presentation will describe the findings of an “online survey into computers and language teaching” carried out from July to December, 2002. The purpose of the 52-item survey was to discover the extent to which language teachers are incorporating computers into their teaching, and to find out what attitudes they have towards the use of computers in teaching. With 334 responses from 36 countries it is believed to be one of the most extensive analysis of teachers' attitudes since Michael Levy's CALL survey.

The survey was carried out entirely online, and respondents were informed about the survey via computer related language teaching listservs. Thus respondents can be said to be representative of those teachers that currently practice CALL or are considering doing so. Indeed, 77% of the respondents indicated that they have their students do computer related activities as part of their language education, and a further 10% reported that they intended to have students use computers in the future. However, the results also reveal that present use of computers is mainly limited to email, and word processing. As Larry Cuban pointed out; “As important supplements as these have become to many teachers’ repertoires, they are far from the project-based teaching and learning that some techno-promoters have sought.”

As well as displaying the results and analysis of the survey, the presenter will also outline the implications that the findings of the survey have for the future practice of CALL, with particular reference to teaching paradigms. Furthermore, suggestions will be made as to what actions need to be taken so that CALL can be effectively incorporated into the mainstream of language teaching. The presentation will therefore provide participants with a description of the present state of CALL as well as being a ‘venue’ for discussion about the future of CALL.

Detailed results of the survey can be seen here:
http://www.hokuriku-u.ac.jp/p-ruthven/survey/

In today’s world, students and professionals need digital literacy skills as well as the traditional print literacy skills. They need to be able to access and critically assess digital information. They need to use the electronic medium to communicate with their colleagues all over the world for a variety of purposes ranging from asking for information to exchanging ideas about issues of interest or sharing research findings. The use of electronic technologies is no longer a choice but rather a necessity.

English is an essential tool for both research and communication and it also enables use of the technology. At the same time, the technology allows ample exposure to the language and presents many opportunities for its use. Teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) can no longer ignore the need for inclusion of digital skills in their courses. These skills include, among others, accessing and reading online information efficiently and critically; writing in an electronic context using the range of possibilities afforded by word processors, email programs and other synchronous and asynchronous tools; and utilizing the special features available on the Web such as search engines, online dictionaries, and encyclopedias.

In our presentation we will review the literature on digital literacy skills, and present a rationale for dealing with these skills in EAP courses. We will then describe the specific skills that we have selected for inclusion in our courses and show examples of online academic tasks we have developed. In addition, we will present the results of a student attitude questionnaire in which EAP students at Tel Aviv University judged the importance of various digital literacy skills.

LANG’s mission at the University of Toronto is to foster understanding and collaboration among the language departments so that they may exchange develop and disseminate ideas and research on pedagogy and second language learning. The group provides a forum dedicated to the principles of continued research in the field of information technologies and the promotion of the integration of such technologies in the foreign language learning context. To this end, LANG has facilitated exploration in research and practice in language learning and teaching in the language departments at the University of Toronto and it has enhanced the ability of its members to support the use of information technology in classroom and multimedia centres settings.

LANG’s most recent undertaking was a collaborative interdepartmental project to design, develop and produce a set of open source Web based tools for online assessment and/or evaluation of University level second language learners. The tools are fully interactive and learner-specific. Authorial in nature, they are designed to provide a common environment among language departments/users to establish a database management system to evaluate and share results of both long-term patterns in student/course enrolment and the impact of ICT in research and teaching. The tools will also provide user/member profiling, personalized verification and feedback.

Tandem learning as an implementation of learner autonomy principles brings together learners with complementary L1/L2 combinations (e.g. a German student learning English and an Irish student learning German) in a learning partnership. The three principles behind tandem learning are bilingualism (using both languages in equal amounts); reciprocity (supporting the partner by providing comprehensible input, correcting errors, etc.); and learner autonomy (assuming responsibility for and taking control of the learning agenda).

The Centre for Language and Communication Studies (CLCS) at Trinity College Dublin has conducted research project in tandem learning in synchronous text-based environments (Multi-User Domains, Object Oriented, or MOOs) since 1998. A recurring problem has been the huge imbalance in bilingualism, as the more proficient L2 tended to take over as almost exclusive means of communication. To counter this problem, we have developed and implemented the bilingual tandem analyser, which analyses MOO input in real time and provides detailed feedback on the balance between the languages used in the exchange.

The paper will look at some of the results of this implementation. Our particular focus will be on learner’s attitudes towards this new tool: will they perceive it as an instrument of control, directed by the teacher; or do they perceive it as a useful tool to support their tandem exchanges?

The international distribution of television programming and the global reach of the World Wide Web provide language learners with important new resources for the acquisition of language and culture. User-friendly tools for computer-mediated communication and multimedia production provide new opportunities for language learners to demonstrate their skills in real-world situations. But the effective use of these resources and tools requires new forms of literacy.

This presentation first examines how the learning objectives for media, technology, and information literacies intersect with those of language learners and teachers. It begins with a brief review of the definitions of these new literacies and of various frameworks and standards proposed for teaching them, e.g., ISTE's standards for technology literacy and SCONUL's model for developing information literacy. Should these definitions be modified to fit a language-learning context? How do the standards for these literacies mesh with accepted proficiency standards for language learning and cultural knowledge?

With examples taken from class assignments, the presenter then considers specific challenges faced by language teachers when they attempt to incorporate new literacies into curricula stretched to produce culturally aware lifelong learners proficient in the traditional four skills. What kinds of learning activities successfully combine the acquisition of language and media literacy? Where are the partners who will assist language teachers and learners to acquire proficiency in technology and information literacies? Can language skills be assessed separately from the ability to use technology, e.g., presentation software? The presentation concludes with a brief discussion of how the restructuring of language learning to incorporate new literacies can produce more eager and capable lifelong learners.

In order to provide language learners with a learning experience that does not leave them frustrated and disappointed, designers of Web-based materials must be aware of all aspects – pedagogical, (inter)cultural and technical - of website usability and to take account of these when planning their website. Based on a review of the literature at the intersection of HCI and CALL, and an investigation of the pedagogical usability of selected language learning websites, we define those aspects which appear to be of the greatest importance in ensuring that learners are able to interact easily and effectively with the website, and are assisted in achieving their learning goals.

Usability issues have long been of interest in human-computer interaction (HCI), where the primary focus has been on technical and ergonomic factors. With the appearance of large numbers of language learning websites, we suggest that understanding what makes such websites usable is increasingly important for language teachers and course designers. Website usability is often not planned in from the beginning of a development; where it is addressed at all, there is a tendency to rely on technical support staff to advise on usability, leading to an emphasis on technical issues alone. Pedagogical and intercultural aspects of usability are often overlooked and, as a result, content providers may even be unable to evaluate their own websites effectively.

Through exemplification and a case study of a language-learning website at the UK Open University, we argue that providing language teachers and course designers with a better understanding of all those aspects contributing to usability enables them to make informed decisions about website design. It also gives them a foundation for carrying out effective evaluations of other language-learning-related websites which may be recommended to students and, as a result, improves the overall learning experience for students.

In 1995, Fanderclai pointed out that educators were not making the most of the potential offered by virtual worlds to support learner-centred approaches to learning. Instead, she argued, they were “…working hard to bring elements of the traditional educational environment into these virtual spaces…” recreating the campus and developing classrooms to contain and confine learners according to ‘traditional’ pedagogies. In the light of this observation, we present an overview of how text-based virtual worlds, in this case MOO, have been used for language learning since the early 1990s. Although there has been some movement away from simply transferring the physical classroom to the virtual learning space, it appears that there are aspects of new literacies such as collaboration, construction and community-building and maintenance, that could be still more directly addressed and encouraged by careful design and structuring of learning events.

Following Harris’ classification (1998, 2001) of telecollaborative activity structures, in this paper we draw upon our experience of designing a MOO-based simulation globale to illustrate that the virtual learning space offers opportunities to practise a greater range of skills and develop new literacies more fully than does a ‘traditional’ face-to-face learning space. Our approach emphasises the application of the tools to support language learning over the operational use of the technology. Following a discussion, with examples taken from data collected from learner and tutor evaluations of this simulation globale, we identify those activities within its pedagogical framework that draw upon new literacies and those that call upon the ‘four skills’. In conclusion, and on the basis of outcomes from our own research and experience, we argue that the 'traditional' language skills are less relevant to the design of online language learning activities than are the new literacies.

References
Fanderclai, T. 1995. MUDs in Education: New Environments, New Pedagogies. Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, 2, 1, p.8.
Harris, J. 2001. Structuring Internet-Enriched Learning Spaces. Learning and Leading with Technology, 28, 4, 50-55.
Harris, J. 1998. Wetware: Why use activity structures? Learning and Leading with Technology, 25, 4, 13-17.

Many university courses still seem to follow the traditional structure: lecture-based and teacher-centred, despite the fact that conditions in the working world have evolved and acquisition of new transferable skills and familiarity with multimedia tools is often a prerequisite in managing in this increasingly multi-literate society. Media Issues 2 was such a course. This course had been taught for some years following a rigid and uninspiring format: teacher-centred, partly lecture-based and mainly video-based. The students had little opportunity to be active lowering significantly the quality of the learning experience. Therefore the course was not only one-sided and lacking in imagination, but also lacked a collaborative and communicative approach and moreover did not fully exploit the potential of the media despite its course title.

In this paper I intend to describe the final outcome of combining an asynchronous module with face-to-face teaching. The current course aims are: to develop and sharpen English language skills; increase student participation and collaboration; utilize and enhance multi-literacy skills through small research tasks and foster higher level thinking skills in the target language. Implementing a Web-based application and the resources of the media amplifies the opportunity to realize several of the course aims and best of all frees up time to use contact hours in class for more productive means, such as discussion, clarification and the creation and maintenance of the learner community. The course content in fact remains the same, but the methods and aims have changed radically in keeping with the above aims. The students are now more in charge of the learning and production phases and acquiring not only more literacy skills in addition to more traditional skills, but also refining social skills.

Recent studies have indicated the presence of several obstacles to computer-mediated intercultural learning, for example that misunderstandings can seriously disrupt communication, that students tend to be motivated by their interest in making personal connections regardless of the projects’ larger goals, and that little appears to be known in terms of what students actually learn (Kern 2000, Belz 2000, O’Dowd 2001, Kramsch/Thorne 2001).

In light of these findings, how can intercultural and language learning processes be organized in a content- and skills-based course environment? Following the concepts outlined in the CULTURA project (Furstenberg et al 2001), the German Department of the University of California at Berkeley and the Language Center at the University of Potsdam jointly designed, carried out and evaluated the “Intercultural Learning Project”.

Initially, it was necessary to determine the differences between the student populations at the two institutions with respect to their media and cultural literacy. These stem primarily from disparities between the respective educational settings and the students’ personal experiences. The results had significant consequences for the planning of the project phases and the design of tasks and worksheets.

In addition to outlining the pedagogical considerations behind the program, this presentation will give a hands-on introduction to the classroom and online materials that have been designed to enable students to explore and analyze cultural differences and to realize their own situatedness in a culture. The participants in the project used WebCT (an e-learning platform), chat sessions and separate e-mail lists for group projects.

In sum, we have at least started the process of sensitizing the students to the notion of cultural difference. At the same time, such projects are well-suited for the development of reading and writing skills, but need to be accompanied by “traditional” classroom work that contains structured skills-related activities. Finally, guided discussions are required to give students an opportunity to reflect on the media-facilitated intercultural exchanges.

University practitioners of ESP (English for Specific Purpose) more than most other group of language teachers rely on tailor-made materials, as the “purpose” in “specific purposes” changes with the subjects their students study, and how advanced the students are in their major subjects of study.
In the last two years it has become feasible for language teachers to deliver their own tailor-made materials on DVD (Digital Versatile Disk). The use of this new medium should be particularly attractive to teachers of oral skills for ESP, as dozens of audio and video cassettes, hundreds of pictures and thousands of pages of text can be shoehorned into one interactive DVD disk twelve centimetres in diameter.

This presentation describes an on-going pilot study of how this technology can be used to teach English oral skills to science students at Helsinki University. The students in my teaching situation range from technical savvy computer scientists to not so technical students of pharmacy. There is also an unequal distribution of resources such as the availability of computers with DVD drives at the various departments of the Faculty of Science.

This attempt to combine all the traditional channels for presenting materials onto DVD disks involves a steep learning curve for the materials writer and a new way of learning for the end users of the materials. The presentation will deal with these problems and others as they are revealed in the near endless cycle of writing the materials, testing the materials on selected students, evaluation of their feedback and rewriting the materials.

My students are medical biologists. In the English course they are to acquire a set of language skills for Academic Purposes, which will help them develop their ability to communicate on professional topics and will be of use for them in their studies and future jobs.

In addition to the general English course I have designed and developed a special course “English for Medical Biologists”. It aims not only to review the skills in general English, but also to form specific skills in ESP. The course consists of four stages and lasts four semesters. It helps to organize the teaching/learning process in the most optimal way, so that all the four language skills would interrelate and interact in it. During the course every student gives four academic presentations on the basis of materials studied. To prepare reports for the conference “Disease. The Greatest Agent of Natural Selection”(3rd semester) they use my textbook Clones, Viruses, etc. Reading and Speaking on Biology and Medicine. The techniques of preparing and delivering presentations are thoroughly elaborated.

My students and I widely use the Internet and other computer tools: electronic dictionaries to find transcriptions, search engines to find some extra information on the topics chosen for reports, word processors to prepare written texts of presentations. Also, we regularly exchange e-mails, especially when preparing for scientific conferences at the 3rd and 4th stages.
Being visually oriented my students as well as all modern students prefer and enjoy finding visual information on the Web to traditional kinds of activity. They are highly motivated to use the Internet in learning English exploiting English itself as a new technological tool at the same time. Using the Internet helps them greatly in acquiring necessary linguistic and communication skills. I help them find materials that best satisfy their needs and are course-driven.

This paper will investigate the introduction of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Southampton. This pilot project is aimed at a group of non-specialised language learners from the School of Engineering. The ELP has been chosen in order to provide students with a portable qualification that documents their language learning beyond that of learning at university. It is described as providing ‘the satisfaction of a lifelong record of developing language skills and as a stimulus to reflect on linguistic competence’ (The European Language Portfolio for Adult and Vocational Learners).

The Portfolio will be compiled in electronic format, supported by the resources of a specifically-designed Blackboard website and the use of IT resources in a weekly learning and teaching session that takes place in a dedicated CALL environment, known as the SMART classroom. This interactive teaching room does enable students to work with various IT resources, be they text-based, oral and aural or presentation media. The tutor acts as a designer of activities and guide to the students in the process of ‘evidence collection’ for the portfolio. This paper will provide an overview of the kinds of activities undertaken by students in order to assemble their portfolio.

Furthermore, the paper seeks to investigate the appropriate teaching methodologies in this dedicated CALL facility and the relationship between learner expectations and learner strategies.

The pilot project will be evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. Questionnaires and student interviews are used to gain a better understanding of the participants’ perspective. This will be supplemented by the tutor’s observations in the SMART classroom watching students working on tasks for their portfolio. It is ultimately hoped that results from this pilot study will lead to a better understanding of learner expectations and strategies in compiling a portfolio in a CALL environment.

We believe that learning a foreign language should not simply be reduced to a matter of acquiring basic skills but calls for a broader literacy that it is essential to preparing future generations who will have to live in a complex society characterized by increased “internationalization” and “interculturalization”. This is where technology can play such crucial role. Computer-based collaboration tools, enabling student to work together in groups, increase tremendously the contexts of metareflection on what it means to became “literate” or an “educated citizen.”. With this purpose in mind, we have established an online connection between the advanced Italian language students of Smith College in Usa and the University’s Computer-Assisted Learning Language and Teaching course students in Italy.

Students were asked to produce a final project by choosing a special socio-cultural subject (e.g. immigration/racism, gender studies, educational systems etc.), and they worked in groups of four (two Italians and two Americans). Each group analyzed a specific topic and builds its project into a website by interacting and by sharing information from two different cultural perspectives – Italian students examined the subject in United States, while American students examined it in Italy. We created a Virtual Learning Environment using and adapting open resource tools (forums, bulletin board, email, etc.)

We mainly focused our work on the preparation of the students for this specific learning process and on the evaluation criteria in terms of relational dynamics with the group and with the electronic environment.The goal was to create an intercultural ground where the interaction of different worldviews can evaluate and minimize differences in socio-cultural behaviors, ideologies, and ways to communicate concepts. More importantly, we gave a chance to Italian students, training to be teachers, to experiment this virtual environment and to relflect on new ways to improve teaching and learning in this electronic communities of study.

Online education is becoming a very popular way for universities and colleges to (i) offer their courses to students who would not be able to attend on-site classes, or (ii) enrich the educational experience of existing courses by adding an international, collaborative dimension to them. However, to date, online education seems to be an almost exclusive domain of higher education and corporate learning institutions. This is why we have started the “Collaborative English Teaching Online” project, whose main goal is to provide VLE hosting, training and support to secondary teachers of English who would like to teach online but lack the resources or skills needed.

In this project, our college (College of Foreign Languages in Poland) offers a Virtual Learning Environment divided into class spaces according to levels of language competence. Teachers from participating schools attend training sessions devoted to teaching online and then, in small groups, collaboratively prepare class materials and manage the online lessons. Designing and running the courses collaboratively has two main advantages: (i) it creates mixed classes with students from different schools and possibly different countries and (ii) it allows the designers/teachers to venture into online education without having to design the whole course on their own.

Our goal is to introduce an international element into the project by inviting (i) secondary teachers of English from other countries to participate in it, and (ii) higher education institutions from other countries to act as national/regional coordinators and training providers.

In this presentation, I would like to give an overview of the project and its development as well as receive some feedback on it. I would also like to invite anyone interested in the project, including secondary schools willing to participate, or universities or colleges willing to become coordinators and training centres in their countries/regions.

The purpose of this poster is to introduce the unique DixEdit editing tool for electronic dictionaries. As part of the EU funded Benedict initiative, the DixEdit project has been developed for the intelligent updating of dictionaries. The poster will describe the versatile features of the DixEdit tool including its capabilities to provide an efficient method of guiding the user to the right spot in the dictionary, to personalize the dictionary information supply and to provide access to corpus information via dictionary entries which have multilayered data representation.

As an example, the poster will also show how the use of the DixEdit tool is being applied to an electronic Finnish-German-Finnish business dictionary, which is a project in progress. The demand for such a dictionary has emerged from three specific needs. First, there is a demand for a comprehensive modern business German dictionary in Finland as the existing published ones have become outdated. Second, with network-based learning environments becoming more and more common in language learning, electronic access to dictionaries is also needed. Third, producing texts in working life takes mainly place with the help of electronic tools and therefore there also is a need to have online access to data.

There is a steadily growing body of research which has suggested that e-mail interactions with native speakers are linked with increases in L2 proficiency (Floréz-Estrada, 1995; Leahy, 2001; Stockwell and Harrington, 2002). These proficiency gains may be attributed to the fact that the medium provides many of the conditions which are thought necessary for SLA, namely input (Long, 1996), output (Swain, 1995) and negotiation of meaning (Gass, 1997), and there is evidence to suggest that all three of these conditions are satisfied in NS-NNS e-mail interactions (e.g., Li, 2000; Stockwell, 2003a).

Negotiation of meaning is easily observable in learner output in e-mail interactions, and this output has provided evidence of how learners deal with some of the input that is provided to them. Research has shown, however, that there are many cases where learners do not reply to the available input (Stockwell, 2003b) which means it is not possible to determine what processes led to the decision to not respond. As a result, students at a university in Japan studying English were paired up with students at a university in Australia studying Japanese culture for an e-mail exchange, discussing different aspects of Japanese culture on a weekly basis for a five week period.

The aim of the study was to determine how the non-native speakers used the language input from the native speakers. Learners were examined throughout the process of receiving input through to responding to (or not responding to) this language input, particularly when the input contained items that were not comprehensible to them. Data were collected through the use of observation, questionnaires, and through text analysis of the e-mail interactions. The implications of the results are described in terms of both second language teaching and further research into second language acquisition through this medium.

The Internet/WWW has brought about important changes in CALL theory and practice, combining elements of early CALL practice such as drills with advanced computer graphics and other digital technologies. These advances in technology, however welcome, have complicated the task of evaluation. The existing literature on CALL evaluation deals mostly with software and CD-ROM packages; little has been written on evaluating Web-based CALL materials.

To remedy this situation, we developed a framework for evaluating CALL instructional Web sites (in press). The framework is composed of three groups of modules: (1) second language acquisition theory and materials evaluation; (2) “traditional” CAI software evaluation; and (3) online courseware instructional design. Through these modules, the framework provides a tool for instructors to evaluate Web-based materials by considering how well they support language learning and how well they utilize the new medium.

In this presentation we will outline briefly the key points of the framework and then demonstrate how it can be applied to two CALL sites. First we posit two typical situations: 1) a teacher wants her students to practice a specific grammatical item; and 2) a teacher uses an e-learning site to supplement her EFL course. We then go through the selection process, suggesting methods and sites that help instructors find suitable materials for their given purposes. Finally, we demonstrate how to use the evaluation framework to develop checklists for evaluating comparatively the shortlisted items. In this process we consider especially elements characteristic of online materials, such as navigation, usability, interactivity, hypertextuality, and “Web-centricness.” This demonstration will provide teachers with a comprehensive and theoretically sound basis for evaluating CALL Internet sites for student use.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the roles of presence and community in such network-based learning environments that exclude face-to-face interaction completely, or partly as in mixed mode course formats. The paper will first outline the theoretical framework of the two concepts, then discuss some practical examples drawn from the presenter’s own data and finally, give some recommendations as to how to foster the roles of presence and community in a network-based learning environment.

The concepts of presence and community have been receiving increasing attention among educators in recent years. As to presence, many of the language teaching faculty, especially those with little or no experience with online teaching often seem to fear the thought of teaching a course in an environment which they cannot “control” through their own physical presence or in which they cannot “see” their students. Of the wide-range studies on presence this paper will focus on those approaching the concept from educational perspectives, e.g. teaching presence (Anderson et al 2001), cognitive presence (Garrison et al 2001) and social presence (Gunawardena & Zittle 1997; Tammelin 1998; Rourke et al 2001).

Partly related to the concept of presence, the concept of community (or a learning community) has also been receiving increasing attention among teachers who have started or are planning to start teaching in an online mode. Although the group cohesion of a class meeting in a four-wall classroom has been extensively studied, it seems that interaction and the formation of learning communities studying in online environments is yet in its infancy (e.g. Hughes & Hewson 1998). Yet, developing a sense of community in such an environment is considered paramount by many instructors (see e.g. Pratt and Palloff 1998).

The main aim of this poster is to describe the “EVA” evaluation project carried out in spring 2003 by the representatives of four Finnish universities for the Finnish Virtual Language Center initiative. The poster first briefly describes the general framework of the Finnish Virtual Language Center initiative and its ongoing sub-projects. The main goal of the initiative is to act as a resource bank and to enable networking between 17 Finnish university language centers and departments involved in the initiative. The poster will then focus on the EVA project, one of the already completed sub-projects partly funded by the Finnish Virtual Language Center initiative.

The main purpose of the EVA project completed in spring 2003 was to develop criteria for evaluating Web-based language learning materials for the use of language teachers in Finnish universities. During the EVA project, the many existing evaluation criteria for Web-based language learning materials. (e.g. MERLOT; CALICO Reviews, EUROCALL, ICT4LT, LingoNet, Nordit, TriO) were first examined and analyzed from the perspectives of both Finnish tertiary language education and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which is currently being integrated into language teaching in Finnish schools and universities.

Drawing on relevant research and the findings of the already completed evaluation projects, recommendations for a set of evaluation criteria were given and as practical examples, they were being applied to some English, Swedish, German and Russian Web-based language learning materials. The final report was published on the Virtual language center Web site in Finnish and the executive summary of the report was also published in English, Swedish and German in June 2003.

We would like to demonstrate how we have combined our virtual reality world with our website to enable a high level of interactivity within a linguistically rich and visually stimulating environment, suitable for both classes and individual learners of all ages.

Features of the World include:
· Many learner avatars
o Body shapes that learners can choose to adopt and range from chickens to spaceships.
· The opportunity to interact with other learners in the target language
o Learners can type messages to each other in real time or can leave telegrams for each other.
o There is also a whisper facility to support weaker learners
· Linguistic support from our website to help learners in their communication
o Learners can view key phrases on a topic while “chatting” to others in the world
· Target-language labels on objects within the World
o These can range from just the name of an object to its history and opinions about it.
· Links to interesting target-language websites
· Displays of learners’ work within the world and links to learners’ individual homepages
o Learners are given their own room within the world which they can furnish as they wish and where they can display their work.
· Learner tracking facilities
o The World Administrator can control and monitor learner activities within the world.
· Grammar presentations
· Linguistic treasure hunts through a fantasy landscape
o Through air, water and fire, to Hell and back, in the quest for linguistic enlightenment!
· Programmable robots that will answer questions, run quizzes and take learners on a tour of the virtual world, all in the target language
· Short videos of native speakers and learners using the target language.

The World can be visited by going to www.esfsall.net and downloading the browser. A guided tour is highly recommended.

It is well known that language input is of crucial importance during the process of second language acquisition. The same is essential in CALL. However, collecting language data is a laborious and time-consuming process that often requires judgment from a number of native speakers. We present a method to automate the collection process, which improves the range of language examples, authors, writing styles, and topics.

The World Wide Web contains a virtually unlimited supply of authentic language data. Simple filtering of it allows a creation of an open-ended bank of pedagogically adequate language examples, which can also be categorized according to specific topics. This approach saves CALL designers a tremendous amount of time in collecting data. Furthermore, allowing learners to select topics yields more attractive systems. The virtually unlimited number of examples also allows an application of statistical machine learning techniques for automatic grammaticality judgment of learners' input. Learners are provided with immediate meaningful feedback.

In this paper we examine the extent to which the use of a virtually unlimited corpus, the Web, improves CALL systems. We present and describe such a Web-based CALL system for learning an aspect of grammar, namely the position of adverbs in an English sentence. However, our approach is not restricted to a particular grammatical aspect or natural language. We also describe the evaluation methodology in which this open-ended-corpus system is assessed and compared to a closed-corpus system with identical tasks, feedback, and GUI. In the study, the improvement of performance of three groups of ESL students: an open-corpus group, a closed-corpus group, and a control group is considered.

We believe that an open-corpus system will contribute to improving learners' performance in acquiring grammatical as well as semantic properties of adverbs, their confidence in positioning adverbs, and vocabulary acquisition more than an equivalent closed-corpus system.

In this talk we will first give a short outline of the rationale behind the development of the CALL programmes Online English Mentor 1 and 2, e-learning materials tailor-made for first-year students at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, followed by a short demonstration of the two online programmes. OEM 1 is business-oriented to a certain degree in its choice of topics and reading texts, yet concentrates primarily on consolidation of general language skills and improvement of weaknesses in the areas of grammar and vocabulary. OEM 2, on the other hand, offers individualised practice opportunities on the business terminology and communication aspects representing the core of the business English curriculum from the second term onwards.

OEM 1 was first used and evaluated in the winter term 2002. Most features which we regarded as pedagogically essential - such as detailed feedback, extensive use of hypertext facilities, adaptability to different learning styles, intuitively comprehensible HCI - were indeed appreciated by students and implemented again in OEM 2. However, not only the different (content) requirements of the second term course, but also student feedback on the first programme and the experience we gained when developing OEM 1 had impact on the technical and pedagogical design of OEM 2. We are going to show how our students' expectations, comments and ideas are reflected in the more recent learning resource.

Furthermore, we will present data on patterns of use - i.e., favourite and ignored tools, types of interaction, regular study versus pre-exam traffic - collected by means of user tracking. Also, we will analyse students' views concerning the usefulness of individual features of the application. Finally, we will offer tentative conclusions concerning correlations between individual learner types and perceptions of the online programme as an effective and enjoyable learning tool.

Commercial CALL programs either pay relatively little attention to vocabulary and/or treat vocabulary as mere lists of rather uninteresting items that need to be learned by heart. Words are typically presented to the learner as plain lists of translational equivalents and tested in a very similar way. Learners often get only summative feedback on the percentage of words they translated as expected. Keeping track of words learned, or - more importantly - those not learned, is a task many CALL programs leave to the learners themselves. CALL developers seem to treat vocabulary as the poor relation.

Research on vocabulary acquisition shows that repetition and spacing are the two most important factors for successful learning. Both of these factors could be implemented relatively easily in a CALL program, but very few commercial CALL programs actually offer such options to students. Work in error analysis and corpus linguistics makes the importance of vocabulary clear: For many learners, vocabulary is the most important source of errors. Lexical errors and lack of adequate vocabulary are the biggest hindrance to communication in the foreign language. Learners themselves also tend to rank vocabulary higher on their list of priorities than grammar.

In my paper, I will try to show where the main problems on the way to better CALL vocabulary programs lie and suggest some improvements. Given the importance of feedback and the difficulties CALL (and ICALL) have in producing reliable, intelligent feedback on learners’ linguistic output, vocabulary could offer the starting point for truly interactive CALL.

Information Technology is still been perceived as the ultimate independent learning platform and in some cases “the new technologies of language learning have tended to latch on to autonomy as one justification for their existence” Benson and Voller (1997:10).

This paper first looks at the pedagogical considerations taken into account when designing online self-study language learning materials (e-packs) for ab initio students on the Institution Wide Language Programme at the London Metropolitan University. The material reaches a wide student population including a significant number of mature and international students, full-time and part-time students, members of the public and staff.

The e-packs, developed for the time being for French and Spanish, consist of twelve online units and contain approximately 120 exercises per language. These include a substantial number of listening activities, which also aim to develop and integrate other skills (reading, writing, grammar, and role-play preparation, and information gathering skills etc.).

All material used is originally written and makes full use of a multimedia environment. It attempts to be interactive and varied, visually attractive and includes animation, graphics, sound and text. The material offers direct answers to questions, delayed answers, language learning tips, language guidance (i.e. grammatical or cultural summaries), appropriate links to Web sites, access to advisory help through email.

Drawing on aspects of Dickinson’s definition of the independent learner (understanding the purpose of pedagogical choices and using appropriate learning strategies), this paper assesses the ability of the e-packs to promote autonomy within a very defined educational context.

The paper will go on to report on a student questionnaire which aimed to highlight issues such as:
§ learner use and evaluation of the e-packs
§ learner interaction in the relationship between the self-study component and the lessons
§ quality of feedback (technical and human)

The conclusion will draw lessons from the experience and will propose a way forward.

We have developed an English pronunciation learning system which estimates the intelligibility of students' speech and ranks their errors from the viewpoint of improving their intelligibility. Error diagnosis is important for self-study since students tend to spend time on aspects of pronunciation that do not noticeably affect intelligibility.

As a preliminary experiment, seven Japanese students' speech was scored from 1 to 5 by linguistic experts. We also counted their error rates for each skill. We found that each intelligibility level is characterized by its distribution of error rates. Thus, we modeled each intelligibility level in accordance with its error rate. Error priority was calculated by comparing students’ error rate distributions with that of the corresponding model.

As non-native speech is acoustically broader than the speech of native speakers, we developed the acoustic model to perform automatic error detection using speech data obtained from Japanese students. Moreover, we used Japanese phoneme models which bear no acoustical differences between English and Japanese, such as /b/ or /d/. As for supra-segmental error detection, we categorized errors frequently made by Japanese students and developed a separate acoustic model for that type of error detection.

Pronunciation learning involves two phases. First, students experience virtual conversation through movies and receive an error profile based on pronunciation errors detected during their conversation. Using the profile, students grasp characteristic tendencies in their pronunciation errors, which in effect lower their intelligibility. Students then practice correcting their individual errors with words or phrases. During this round, they receive the results of their error detection and instructions for correcting the error.

We have begun using this system in a CALL class at Kyoto University, and will be evaluating system performance through the use of questionnaires and speech data logged in the server. System performance will be presented in the final paper.

As interactivity is increasingly recognised as essential by all actors in the CALL domain, the need for immediate and appropriate feedback is felt more acutely. In a society where good writing is still an essential skill in the working world, language learners must assimilate the grammar rules of the language they are learning. However, feedback is very seldom available in CALL software when (relatively) free productions are required of the users. Grammar checkers designed specifically for language learners are called for.

This paper reports on research conducted to build a grammar checker for language learners. It was primarily designed for use as part of a CALL software for the correction of exercises but could also be associated with a word processing software.

Four key features of this grammar checker are (i) a focus on some error types known to be problematic for language learners; (ii) a full analysis of the input sentence allowing the output of information on the sentence structure; (iii) the combined use of different techniques for syntactic error diagnosis, including the well-known constraint relaxation technique (Weischedel & Black 1980, among others) and the more innovative phonological reinterpretation technique; and (iv) an output providing information on the problematic areas but leaving the users to correct the sentence for themselves in order to help them appropriate the correct grammatical notions. These four points will be developed in the presentation with a clear focus on the syntactic error diagnosis techniques.

Weischedel, R. M. & J. E. Black. 1980. Responding Intelligently to Unparsable Inputs. American Journal of Computational Linguistics. 6(2) pp. 97-109.

Focus on communicative competence has often included a desire for incorporation of authentic language materials. A corpus analysis of how four types of speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals and complaints) are realized in natural and elicited spoken discourse can contribute to materials development, and ultimately learner acquisition of pragmatic competence.
Textbooks typically fail to include realistic language samples where speech acts are concerned, and teachers are unwilling or unable to collect samples of spoken language (Boxer & Pickering, 1995; Grant & Starks, 2001; Washburn, 2001; Wong, 2002). In addition, discourse completion responses by native and nonnative speakers have been shown to be unrepresentative of actual language use (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993; Rose, 1994; Sasaki, 1998).
Corpus linguistics, then, can benefit speech act materials design.

Previous corpus-based studies have often considered language without respect to extralinguistic contextual factors such as interlocutor status, degree of imposition and communicative purpose, all of which are important to pragmatic features such as politeness, appropriateness, and illocutionary force. Moreover, it is difficult to correctly identify speech acts using traditional corpus methods because there is not a clear form-function correspondence.
This study sought to address two problems:
§ How can corpus linguistics inform applied linguistics about speech act use in naturally-occurring conversations?
§ How can this information be used in language teaching methodology and materials development?

Speech acts from a million-word spoken corpus and a 30,000-word elicited corpus were examined for linguistic features such as vocabulary, syntax, and pronoun use as well as pragmatic features of directness, politeness and illocutionary force. Naturally-occurring language differs significantly from elicited language, in ways that are not intuitive to linguists or native speakers. After a presentation of the methodology of the study, samples of speech acts in authentic and DCT corpora will be provided and implications for teaching and materials design will be discussed.

Traditionally, a spoken corpus of a language consists of natural speech of native speakers. For many languages, no such corpus exists. This paper discusses the experience of using small, special purpose parallel spoken and written corpora for use in language teaching. While a small corpus does not readily lend itself to a comprehensive Data Driven Learning approach, even a small, special use corpora can be beneficial in the language learning situation.

Special purpose spoken corpora can provide motivation for reluctant students who are not stimulated by writing alone. They can be particularly useful for tonal languages and languages with different stress accent and information from the learner’s L1 (especially if the stress is not orthographically marked). Sound corpora can help learners to become accustomed to the sounds and melody of the language, even if they do not initially understand everything.

Not only is a spoken corpus useful for the language learner, it is also useful for non-native teachers, who wish to provide their students with access to language spoken by native speakers. In a situation in which there is very limited access to native speakers, it provides an alternative to the teacher’s voice. Obviously, this need is more acute for students of non-major languages, but students of major languages can also benefit from special purpose spoken corpora. Written corpora are useful for highlighting features not frequently used in spoken speech. Furthermore, parallel spoken and written corpora can be used for semi-literate L1 learners for literacy purposes.

Although CALL resources are mainly deployed in an academic setting, it is important to look beyond this traditional environment, where certain current CALL assumptions do not hold. While this paper reports on special use corpora in the non-major language context, the findings are of general interest, especially where there are reluctant students, a limited number of native teachers and where student literacy levels are low.

Even if a dedicated physical CALL environment is not always available to the student, we can still prepare learners for such an environment. In some cases, it may be socially and pedagogically preferable to teach/learn in a community-based setting, before progressing the student to a more individual CALL learning environment. Oxford (1995) reports that different nationalities tend to favour different learning styles and strategies. While the use of one computer for many students might be driven by resource constraints rather than pedagogical considerations, it can turn out to be a positive situation as it may suit the learning style of the students.

This paper discusses the approach adopted during a project for novice computer and CALL users in order to prepare them for an independent learning situation (using a CALL tutor in Levy (1997) terminology). While McCarthy (1999) cautions that we cannot take learner motivation for granted, motivation levels were high amongst students in this project. The methodology adopted was to explain the rationale behind the course, and then to walk the students through one complete lesson. At various stages, the alternative learning strategies were explained to the students, emphasising that no particular strategy was better than any other and that they could choose whichever one suited them.

The students enjoyed this approach as it minimized the stress involved in using the computer and enabled them to learn in a relaxed manner. Students were then invited to use the CALL materials while still in a group setting.
As the courseware is relatively simple, with an easy to understand interface, the learning curve is not very steep. Thus, complete novice users could use the courseware immediately. This proved enjoyable for the learners. Once the other students saw how easy it was to use the courseware, they were encouraged to continue to use the system in their own time. The learners were cautioned to temper their expectations and to bear in mind that one will not become a fluent speaker ‘by magic’, just with the use of the courseware alone.

References
Levy, M., 1997. Computer-Assisted Language Learning (Context and Conceputalization). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCarthy, B., 1999. Integration: the sine qua non of CALL: CALL-EJ online Vol. 1 No. 2 September, 1999.
Oxford, R., L., 1996. Language Learning Strategies around the world: Cross-cultural perspectives. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, Hawaii.

After 75 years experience of providing materials for independent learners in the form of programmes and books, BBC Languages have now made “free “ beginners’ online courses, available via the public service website, in the Big Four European languages-Spanish, French, German and Italian. The response, in numbers of page impressions and unique users, has been everything we had hoped for. But we have also been able, over two years, to assess qualitative outcomes through the collection of feedback and via a research project (in partnership with the Nuffield Foundation). The findings provide interesting insights into the expectations and the behaviour of “independent “ online users and the implications for dovetailing this resource with conventional taught classes for adults.

This Show and Tell presentation will introduce the Steps “bite-sized” online courses and the new audiences that they have attracted, concentrating in particular on their needs, motivations and habits. Responses to the courses have caused us to modify a number of our early approaches and also to question our original assumptions about the strengths and weaknesses of unsupported learning and the desirability of linear progression through the materials. We have, though, by means of a “customer-focused” method of delivery, begun to find strengths amidst the inherent difficulties of a one-size-fits-all approach. A second and increasingly important objective has been to investigate the ways in which the “Steps “ can be added on to, or blended with, conventional adult classes, in a way that will attract a new wave of adult learners to MFL. The findings of our research, conducted in a number of different learning centres, is of particular interest in the light of the new Government strategy for language learning.

Shneiderman (1997) emphasises the social and collaborative/co-operative dimensions of the Internet that allow learners to participate in experiences meaningful beyond the confines of the (virtual) classroom and, discussing new literacies as these affect language learning in particular, Warschauer (1998) urges, “don't let the computer, or even language itself, become the focus of instruction -- but rather focus on how students can combine use of language with new technology to achieve a meaningful social, cultural or personal purpose.”

In this paper, we examine how electronic corpora and log files from text-based synchronous exchanges can be used to inform the design of language learning activities to take these dimensions and purposes into account. As few learner corpora are available from either written or spoken domains, and fewer still for computer-mediated communication (CMC), our attention focuses primarily on native speaker CMC data. Since the early 1990s, electronic discourse has been of interest to researchers. Analyses have usually suggested that it contains features from both oral and written domains.

On the basis of a review of such analyses and a discussion our research findings, we argue that if this is so, language teachers need to be aware of the register they are likely to encounter, including its medium-specific elements, meta-linguistic features and sociolinguistic aspects, since this may not be typical of the discourse of face-to-face communication in the target language. Teachers focussing on target language practice may even need to (re)consider their purpose for using CMC with learners. Finally, using illustrations from our own investigations, we suggest language teachers can usefully employ CMC corpora and log files to help design activities requiring learners to make use of the collaborative and social perspectives of new technologies in order to achieve their learning goals, rather than concentrating on discrete language skills in an inappropriate environment.

References
Shneiderman, B. 1997. Relate-Create-Donate: An educational philosophy for the cyber-generation, Computers & Education, 31, 1, 25-39.
Warschauer, M. (1998, July). New media, new literacies: Challenges for the next century. Plenary address at the annual conference of the English Teachers Association of Israel, Jerusalem.

To facilitate higher-order cognition in the learning of English scientific writing in a Taiwanese university setting, blended online teaching was implemented in this study. The rationale centers around the theory of situated cognition and Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development. Learners’ online learning strategies, knowledge building processes and results were examined respectively. The subjects were freshmen who took the researcher’s English scientific writing classes, with the course length of one academic year. Critical strategies for academic thinking and writing were first taught before the learners began their online learning.

Rather than replacing traditional pedagogies, online teaching was implemented in this study to complement the teaching of English scientific writing, aiming to bring about more productivity in learners’ English scientific writing. Advantages of online teaching, such as the interactivity, its facility for blending multimedia materials with the specific targets for learning, the flexibility of learners to utilize the online materials for their own learning, and the instructor’s immediate feedback to the learner were examined. Learners’ progress in English scientific writing was measured by an online writing assessment every two months.

The online discussion forum serves as the communication board where every learner posts his or her own writing and gets feedback immediately from peers and the instructor. Rich interaction took place in the forum, and critical thinking was found in learners’ feedback to each other’s writing in various cognitive rhetorical activities. Discourse analysis was employed to analyze these written corpora to examine learners’ online learning strategies and knowledge building processes. The results of the online writing assessments indicate that higher-order cognition was achieved through this type of blended online teaching.

This research focuses on the creation and investigation of computer assisted learning environments for efficient multimedia language learning. The following aspects are at stake: how can we create multimedia learning environments that stress either implicit or explicit language learning? What is the influence of the interface of a multimedia environment on explicit or implicit language learning and does it has specific short term and long term effects?

Different versions of the same basic application (and the same content, in particular the expression of “order” in French, both in an onomasiological and in a semasiological approach) are designed, tested and evaluated. This paper outlines the way to and the detailed research design that has been adopted. It starts off with an overview of the (many) different fields of research that are connected to this topic, ranging from human-computer interaction (HCI) and interface design, over cognitive psychology (Anderson) and multimedia learning (Mayer, Moreno) to recent insights in second language acquisition (Hulstijn), CALL (Desmet, Chapelle) and “gameplay” (Southern).

Further, we explain the research design: the choice of topic and the creation of the different learning environments, the different learning paths, the experiment design and the qualitative and quantitative data analysis. Finally, we present a framework for the different hypotheses and expected outcomes.

The development of new literacies to equip students for full participation in the Information Age has become a focal point in educational discourse within recent years. Not only are students required to demonstrate their competence in subject matter, but they also need to acquire a new range of skills which involve appropriate and efficient management of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). This poses a new challenge for foreign language teachers and learners alike, demanding a reconceptualization of traditional classroom practices.

In this poster, I present the structure of a Gradual Integration Approach to the teaching of skills, as one possible way of helping teachers deal with what can be considered a methodological paradigm shift. This approach allows learners to develop language and electronic skills concurrently. It also proposes staggering the rate at which technology is introduced into the programme of study. The deliberate limitation of the technology used in an initial phase of this approach, a scenario which I describe as the Limited Resource Environment (LRE), gives learners the chance to develop both these skills on a phase basis.

Using this premise, I propose and outline a 2-phase research project which looks at the teaching of writing in the LRE and beyond. This project forms the basis of my PhD thesis and is grew out of my experience as a foreign language teacher in Trinidad and Tobago, where the integration of computer technology into the language classroom has not yet taken root.

The poster is divided into 3 sections. In the first and second sections, I present the key concepts of the Gradual Integration Approach and the stages of the project respectively. The final section enumerates the issues which the findings of the project hope to address, thereby dismissing or establishing ground for a Gradual Integration Approach in developing and linking language and electronic literacies.

New information- and communication technologies have an essential role in today’s business life, and businesses have to present themselves and their products both online and off-line. In order to be able to compete on the international market, enterprises have to present themselves and their products also in foreign languages. To meet the needs of the target groups not only language skills are required but also knowledge about culture specific communication styles. In order to discover the culture specific differences in Finnish and German business communication on the Web, a study of Finnish and German enterprise websites was carried out. On the basis of the study an information and language training programme for employees in marketing and public relations as well as for students of economics and sociology was developed with the support of the European Commission under the Leonardo da Vinci programme in 1996 – 2000.

The data for the study consisted of some 100 websites: 58 Finnish and 38 German enterprises of different sizes and branches, approaching different target groups from Business-to-Business to Business-to-Consumer, collected in 1997. A spot check of websites in 2002 showed that the main culture specific differences were still the same. These can be found, for example, in the following extralinguistic and text areas: use of interactive possibilities, complexity of structure, length of text and detailed information. Stylistic differences occur, for example, in compactness (maximising vs. minimising tendencies) and objectivity (use vs. avoidance of exaggerations etc.). Further differences can be found in the form of address and the use of Anglicisms. The results of the study are presented on the CD-ROM “Webvertising German/Finnish” and taken into account in designing the language training programme included.

New media have become increasingly important both in gathering information and communicative skills training. To utilize these sources for promoting student mobility, a hybrid multimedia language learning and information programme on CD ROM with links to the Web, called EUROMOBIL, was developed. The programme exists for the target languages English, German, Finnish and Hungarian, and an extension for Czech and Romanian is being planned. The development of new media language training programmes differs from traditional materials design and makes new demands on language teachers and linguists: in addition to teaching and linguistic competence, also media competence is required.

The programmes have to be user friendly, long loading times should be avoided, and navigation has to be easy. Exercises must be short to fit the screen, and form relatively independent units to avoid the need to search for connections by clicking through the programme. Learner progress is, to a considerably extend, influenced by the feedback given. A specific feature of the computer is that it can only provide right-wrong-feedback. Thus, many programmes offer grammar and lexical exercises that allow such answers. Multimedia programmes can often also be characterised as “edutaining”, and the question is how multimedia programmes for communicative skills training can be developed and how we can move from entertaining towards a more pragmatic, action oriented material design. Suggestions for solving this problem will be presented from the EUROMOBIL programme.

Literacies, Technologies, and Learning Communities:
Speaking and writing in the virtual classroom

Robin Goodfellow
Institute of Educational Technology
Open University, UK

To address the challenge of literacy in the age of technology is to confront the issue of whether new communications media, especially computer-mediated communication (CMC), create new demands on the literacy of their users, or whether they simply add new social contexts to the ones in which we already need to read and write. In support of ‘techno-literacy’ we find Western governments, the IT industry, and other authors of the knowledge society, plus many honest teachers and learners seeking practical ways to implement curricula which call for new technology-focused outcomes, such as ‘information skills’, ‘communication skills’ and ‘online teamworking’. For ‘social literacies’ we hear a growing number of voices, mainly from inside the institutions most threatened by the new skills agenda, ie: the universities, but also from other honest teachers and learners already out there in the virtual classrooms, who are finding the rhetoric of technology-as-transformation inadequate to explain why some people have enjoyable, fulfilling online learning experiences which result in success, whilst others have miserable, frustrating experiences ending in failure. It is not my intention here to try to provide an answer to this vexing question, but simply to use the fact that we still have to ask it, to draw attention away from the supposed newness of new electronic literacy practices, and re-focus it on the social nature of online literacy events. To help me do so I will draw on examples from online communities of learners that I am familiar with. Even in our cyberspace personas, I will argue, we continue to operate within the linguistic and cultural frames that define our embodied social identities. I hope to convince you that the challenge of literacy in the age of technology is not so much about how to equip learners with the skills to use modern media, but rather is about how to help us all - learners, teachers, course designers, educational managers - to understand the kinds of social action that are played out through text in the new virtual learning environments.