It gives me pleasure to welcome this evening so many distinguished international scholars to this state reception in honour of EUROCALL. In particular I am very pleased to be able to acknowledge the role of Dublin City University in this conference. DCU is one of our most innovative and dynamic institutions and I think it is very fitting that they should be involved in an endeavour such as this.

In spite of the increasing availability of highquality CALL material, it is a fact upported by Laurillard et al.'s (1993) survey of academics' use of courseware materials that many lecturers in higher education are more often put off rather than attracted by the completeness of the material available. They would prefer to have more control over both the orm and content of the CALL material they intro-duce into their own courses, courses hich are usually of their own design, sometimes based on research interests and which ave evolved from several years' refinement and fine tuning. The recent appearance of pecialised authoring templates such as The Poetry Shell (Timbrell 1994), designed for tudying poems of up to 20,000 characters in length, and several authorable products from he TELL Consortium including an authoring shell for the translation package Translt-TIGER (Thompson et al 1997), seems to indicate a continuing, if not expanding role for institution-based CAL development.

This article will demonstrate the methodology behind the way in which two quite different tools were used to complement each other. By using a variety of authentic source materials, and carefully integrating this material into a second year French course, the authors believe they have provided a rich source of material which other universities might well be able to exploit. The article will explain the advantages and disadvantages of some aspects of each of the tools, talk about the difficulty of overcoming common problems such as giving good feedback, adequately exploiting authentic material, and finish by presenting the results of their work on evaluating this material with students. Based on a case study in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Dundee, the article looks at the problems involved in producing CALL material using two separate authoring packages. It explores the exploitation of authentic material in a multimedia environment, looks at the advantages and disadvantages of the tools used by providing a comparative evaluation, and discusses the complex problems faced by teachers in developing CALL and integrating it into their courses.

The topic of EUROCALL '97, ‘Where research and practice meet’, is perhaps the most provocative and complex one in all of higher education. It would be interesting to recast the assertion that EUROCALL '97 is where research and practice meet as a more probing question: Where do research and practice meet? Unarguably, yes, at this conference: our program – the variety of presentations on practice, and on the research done on practice, and on theoretical research and the nature of research – makes that clear. But it is not only at this yearly gathering; research and practice also meet in the organization of EUROCALL, and for many of us in our daily professional lives. But we could push the question further and ask: do research and practice meet regularly and inherently in the profession of CALL? In the multimedia classroom or language center? In our materials? In cyberspace? in the mind of the learner? To most of those questions we would probably have to give, reluctantly, a negative answer.

This paper relates to the projected role of the new technologies in university teaching in the light of considerations of cost, context and culture. The author is currently engaged in a study of the successful application of the new technologies in university distance teaching, in North America and countries of the European Union.

This paper deals more with what is sent down the pipe than with the pipe itself. In other words our concern is more with the pedagogical quality of software than with hardware or structures. It simply aims at presenting several attempts to resolve problems of understanding and speaking English met by French students. In every one of these attempts we have resorted to information technology. More particularly we have used authoring toolkits in order to ‘feed’ computers with our teaching methods adapted to the students′ needs. We have fried to keep a critical eye on our practice, which has enabled us to find answers with a limited scope even though we hope they might be of interest as a starting point for new reflections. The software we have developed represents those answers.

The article provides a description of the ReLaTe (remote language teaching) project, to develop a working demonstrator using a multicast-based conferencing system (Mbone service), for distance foreign language tuition. It covers aspects of technical development for applications over SuperJANET and gives an overview of the trials and evaluation, including how students and teachers adjusted to the system; the advantages and drawbacks of the system; how the system affected learning and teaching in the context of acquisition and delivery of foreign languages. The ReLaTe project is a joint research project between the University of Exeter and University College London, involving the Foreign Language Centre and IT Services (Pallas) at Exeter and the Language Centre and the Department of Computer Science at UCL. The project began in September 1994, with funding from BT and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) of the Higher Education Council of the UK. mis article covers the work of the project from September 1994 until December 1995.

Au dix-neuvième coup du 6ème jeu de son match contre Deep(er) Blue, le 13 mai 1997, le grand maître Garry Kasparov déclare forfait pour éviter le déshonneur d'un échec et mat en bonne et due forme.

Avant le match, la presse spécialisée, et l'autre déclaraient en substance: si la machine gagne e'en est fini du monde “moderne” tel que nous le connaissons depuis la Renais-sance; e'est le début d'une ère inconnue

When Susan presented this paper at EUROCALL 97 she was extremely ill. As Susan's PhD supervisor, I knew only too well what she was going through when she mounted the rostrum and nervously organised her notes, but I could not have imagined that in two short months her life would come to an end. Such was Susan's courage in her struggle against cancer that she gave few outward indications of her suffering and only looked to the future, continuing to teach, to research and to give her attention to her home and family.

My last conversation with Susan centred on this paper and the trials she was about to conduct with her students in the new academic year. The paper is published here with the minimum of editing. It stands as a tribute to Susan's research but represents only a short summary of the vast amount of data that she had collected so meticulously, and it only hints at the interesting findings that were beginning to emerge. It is likely, however, that the mass of notes that Susan has left behind will yield further results.

Susan is greatly missed by her colleagues and students at Middlesex University and by all her friends and family.

The role of the conceptual dictionary in CALL to enable both active learning and passive referencing is becoming well-established. The motivation for this work comes from the analysis of an existing conceptual dictionary that, whilst exhibiting many strengths, proved difficult to extend with multimedia capabilities. The focus of this paper is the design and development of a conceptual dictionary, incorporating a multimedia framework, by making use of established techniques from software engineering and computer science. The analysis, data design and interface design for the new system are discussed. A prototype system has been developed using Delphi and Paradox running on Windows 95.

This program is designed for improving student learning skills both in class and in independent learning mode in a number of areas: textual analysis, résumé work and vocabulary extension. It is not a concordance program, although it has some elements of a concordance, but seeks to provide a computerenhanced working environment for the pedagogy of textual study for advanced language learners. Unlike other text-based programs, which mainly deal with text enhancement, concordancing and the provision of exhaustive linguistic analysis of stylistic features, TAP (Text Analysis) is concerned to provide students with a pathway that will enable them to generate their own analysis of any text studied within the program.

In ReCALL 9 (2), in the article on page 8 the name of Paul Baker at the University of Lancaster was mis-spelled. Apologies for this.

In the same issue, in the CALICO 97 report on page 64, Matthew Fox's affiliation was given as University of Southampton, whereas Matthew is at Southampton Institute.

Summer 1998 was certainly an important one for those of us interested in the use of Teaching and Language Corpora. The third TALC conference was held at Keble College, Oxford, under the more than able auspices of Lou Burnard. Lou had carefully prepared a program of talks which challenged the TALC community, and moved on the TALC debate further.

This paper looks at computer-mediated conferencing (CMC) in the international arena, and considers whether culturally influenced behaviour has an effect on communication online. There is consideration of the indicative areas for cross-cultural misunderstanding taken from research into management communication, and also from research into gendered difference in posting styles on newslists and in ‘netiquette’ guidelines. The results from a small sample of questionnaires exemplify the cultural attitudes towards learning of a UK-based group of respondents. Trie question is raised of whether the ‘reduced social dimension’ of CMC allows participants in a conference to overcome social barriers, or whether the lack of social clues present in face-to-face interaction leads to greater confusion.

How realistic is it to achieve good quality language learning and teaching using technology? This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of using CD-ROMs and Web-based materials in the quest for providing meaningful interactive language learning strategies to students. It will demonstrate that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, at least in terms of pedagogy, and that there is no need to reject technology despite difficulties and frustrations because the latest developments in technology, especially on the WWW, have significantly increased the potential for even more authentic interaction in the classroom. Illustrations from our Vietnamese course are included.

Has the time come to re-evaluate the role of the teacher in technology-enhanced language learning (TELL)? Studies into Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and TELL have tended to focus on issues relating to learner/computer interaction or learner/learner interaction mediated via the computer (eg Warschauer 1996: 7–26). Relatively little research has been undertaken to try and understand how technology can best be used for language acquisition (cf. Matthews 1994: 35–401a or Zähner 1995: 34–481b) particularly at a distance, to improve both the effectiveness of the learning and the learner's enjoyment of it. Indeed those studies which have been undertaken have tended to be inconclusive (cf. Pedersen 1987). This paper attempts to begin to redress the balance by focusing on teaching and learning issues related to technology mediated distance language acquisition, with particular emphasis on the role of the teacher. The findings in this paper are based on the pilot phase of the Language Learning Network, a project to design, deliver and evaluate a technology mediated-vocational distance language course. With distance learning, as with classroom-based courses, communication with and support from the tutor is considered paramount. The project has established models for regular synchronous and asynchronous contact with tutors, provided in the context of time and budgetary constraints. Having validated the courses for accreditation and wider distribution on a commercial and part-time studies basis, much attention has been paid to the questions of learner support, assessment and quality assurance.