At the recent EUROCALL conference at the University of Limerick, my co-editor, Graham Chesters, remarked on two very heartening changes in the constituency of EUROCALL conference participants over the past ten years: one was the increasing number of younger teachers and researchers; the other was the multi-national representation, compared to the relatively small number of European countries who made up EUROCALL’s main body of members at the Hull conference in 1993.

The increasing emphasis on ‘e-learning’ in all sectors of education, including vocational and professional domains, offers great potential to provide interactive, up-dateable multimedia materials which allow greater flexibility of access and use. This paper reports on an EU-funded, e-learning project which aims to exploit on-line technology to develop intercultural business and language skills for European managers in the construction industy. It advocates an integrated approach to language and culture training, describing how a ‘cultural syllabus’ was designed to develop users’ understanding of key aspects of European work culture and practices alongside their professional language skills. The resulting matrix syllabus incorporates insights from theoretical frameworks together with factual information and authentic accounts of cross cultural work experiences. It argues that the growing demand for on-line learning materials needs to be matched by great attention to quality of course and materials design so that technology enhances, rather than detracts from, content and pedagogy.

Educators and researchers in the acquisition of L2 phonology have called for empirical assessment of the progress students make after using new methods for learning (Chun, 1998, Morley, 1991). The present study investigated whether unlimited access to a speech-recognition-based language-learning program would improve the general standard of pronunciation of a group of middle-aged immigrant professionals studying English in Sweden. Eleven students were given a copy of the program Talk to Me from Auralog as a supplement to a 200-hour course in Technical English, and were encouraged to practise on their home computers. Their development in spoken English was compared with a control group of fifteen students who did not use the program. The program is evaluated in this paper according to Chapelle’s (2001) six criteria for CALL assessment. Since objective human ratings of pronunciation are costly and can be unreliable, our students were pre- and post-tested with the automatic PhonePass SET-10 test from Ordinate Corp. Results indicate that practice with the program was beneficial to those students who began the course with a strong foreign accent but was of limited value for students who began the course with better pronunciation. The paper begins with an overview of the state of the art of using speech recognition in L2 applications.

We present an on-line learning system for the Italian and German languages especially created to help the people living in the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen prepare the so-called bilingual proficiency exam. In the first part of the paper we present the peculiar political, social and linguistic situation of the Province and describe the bilingual proficiency exam. After having clarified the background in which our learning system originates, we will concentrate on the system itself presenting the different parts it consists of. Section 4 will describe the system function, and section 5 will make some final comments and highlight future prospects.

This article will start with the situation at the Open University, where languages are taught at a distance. Online tuition using an audio-graphic Internet-based conferencing system called Lyceum is one of the ways used to develop students’ communicative skills.

Following Garrett’s call for an integration of research and practice at EUROCALL 1997 (Garrett, 1998) – a call which is still valid today – the present article proposes a conceptual framework which can support the use of conferencing systems such as Lyceum in language learning and teaching. In the first part of the article, I examine several pedagogical theories supporting language learning, that is, second language acquisition and sociocultural theories, and multimodality, and apply them to the practice of audio-graphic computer-mediated communication (CMC) as used at the Open University. I also build on previous research, which, however, is still dominated by written CMC. What Erben stated in 1999 is still true: that audio-graphic technology “remains under-researched and under-theorised.” (Erben, 1999:230). Firstly, I therefore examine studies on written CMC and secondly those that have been conducted on audio-graphic CMC in order to identify the benefits and challenges of these media.

Both the pedagogical theory and previous studies of CMC have informed the design and implementation of online tuition at the Open University. Thus the second part of the article reports on a research project on Lyceum, which took place in 2002. The goal of the project was to evaluate the use of audio-graphic conferencing in practice, and this in turn has instigated both improvements in the software used and in student support as well as further changes to the task design. I present some findings and discuss both the challenges of audio-graphic conferencing that were encountered and the benefits that were identified.

There has been much enthusiasm shown in the literature about Native Speaker-Nonnative Speaker (NS-NNS) e-mail interactions, associating them with increased motivation and participation and reduced anxiety (Beauvois & Eledge, 1996; Leh, 1997; Aitsiselmi, 1999). Recent research has now also begun to link these interactions with increases in L2 proficiency (Floréz-Estrada, 1995; Stockwell & Harrington, 2003). As some studies have suggested that L2 learners should reach a certain number of e-mail interactions in order for benefits to accrue (Lamy & Goodfellow, 1999; Stockwell & Harrington, 2003), researchers have started to turn their attention towards what factors play a role in helping to facilitate longer interactions. One factor that appears to be important in sustaining longer conversation sequences is the topics discussed during the interactions (Stockwell & Levy, 2001). While Lamy & Goodfellow (1999) investigated the topic threads during on-line discussions with multiple participants, threads in NS-NNS paired interactions through e-mail remain largely unexplored. Thus, in this study, 48 learners of Japanese involved in e-mail interactions with native speakers were investigated to determine what features of topic threads contributed to sustaining interactions. The end-of-thread messages (i.e., those messages which were the last message in a conversation thread) were examined in terms of whether or not a reply was invited, and those messages for which a reply was invited were further analysed to determine why a reply was not received. The paper concludes with suggestions for how conversation threads may be sustained, and some directions for future research.

Though we often speak of the development of CALL as an academic discipline and its growth as a field of inquiry, little evidence has to date been gathered to prove it. This descriptive study investigates the current state of and changes in CALL research output and its characteristics such as theoretical foundation, method of evidence gathering, and reporting standards. It is based on a numerical analysis of 91 research articles published in 1980–2000 in seven English language journals. CALL emerges from this study as a fast developing area of research, which draws on an increasingly diverse body of theory and methods from a number of cognate disciplines. CALL researchers are increasingly more confident about their research, as reflected in the high level of generalization present in the examined sample. This is not however matched by proper attention given in their reports to research credibility issues.

This article discusses the applications of the theory of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) to teaching and learning a foreign language, in this case, one of the ‘Less Commonly Taught Languages’, Finnish. The ‘Virtually Finnish’ project was based on the idea of creating a larger, virtual Finnish learning community among the second-year Finnish language students in five US universities during the fall semester, 2001. CSCL was chosen as a base, as its principal goal is to aid the learners in sharing and distributing their knowledge to the whole learning community. In addition to discussing the set up and the content of the project, the students’ feedback about their language learning experience in the CSCL-environment will be examined. Furthermore, the conclusions, and the realization of our goals from the perspective of CSCL, as well as the students’ feedback on the collaborative process will be discussed. Based on the knowledge gained from limited feedback, a discussion of tools to aid language students in becoming a part of motivating and authentic collaboration projects on-line will be discussed. Looking at the students’ work on-line, as well as the feedback received, it was realized that certain skills crucial for communication have been neglected in teaching. Furthermore, it was realized that teaching on-line learning strategies in addition to teaching the target language is crucial. Future plans, and ideas for research in the area of CSCL will be shared in anticipation of inspiring others to undertake further research.

This paper presents a method for the assessment of oral fluency in Business English according to a two corpora-based lexical approach. The original query for our research is the possibility of estimating the level of oral skills among Business English (BE) learners by contrasting their word use in oral presentations with corpus data frequencies. Use of Information Technology (IT) resources and electronic BE corpora is thus measured in the evaluative approach to identify significant performance changes between learners who have used such electronic resources and learners who have not.

This paper considers key questions concerning computer-based language-learning environments. Using evidence from current literature, it discusses the main characteristics of such environments including human, technical and physical resources, communicative structures, information management, and cultural contexts. It then uses data from an investigation of the universities of Cambridge, Toronto and Ulster to assess the pedagogical effectiveness of the computer-based environments currently in operation in these three institutions.

It considers, in particular, the integrative role that computer-based language learning environments seem to provide. Although each institution has integrated computer technology into language teaching and learning in different ways, a key element of each environment has been the establishment of a common computer-mediated infrastructure, enabling effective information dissemination, resource distribution, communication and teaching and learning. No single common infrastructure would be suitable in all three, however, in each case, it was found that the environments created were valuable, especially in integrating elements of the teaching and learning process that would normally have remained apart.

In concluding that the creation of a computer-based language learning environment in the present climate is beneficial, it was noted that adequate technical resources and a management that is keen to integrate computer technology into all aspects of university life is a key factor in their success.

This article discusses some theoretical and methodological problems and issues in the study of computer-supported learning activities with special reference to a discourse perspective in research. Special emphasis is laid on finding ways to reach the participant perspective in computer-supported collaborative learning projects, which are by nature polycontextual. By this term we refer to the diverse scenes and situations of learning activities that computer-supported learning involves. We will also address the issue of making claims on effective pedagogies, leaning on the theory of discourse as situated and constructive, which again sets special requirements on what kinds of assumptions and interpretations can and should be derived through empirical analysis of data. Instead of rushed normative guidelines for instruction we should now take time and examine critically what is really happening in computer-supported environments in real-life situations. A look at the particular is needed. An important question to examine, for example, is how students and teachers use these tools in their everyday lives and how these processes are talked about. We will discuss through a number of examples the multimodal and polycontextual nature of meaning making in participant activities during three different university language courses between 1998–2002. This article considers relevant research approaches with the aid of theoretical discussion and examples of analysis.

Developing multimedia courseware for successful integration into a wider system necessitates close attention to a multitude of factors. After a brief literature survey and a critical examination of some overly enthusiastic claims concerning the benefits of multimedia, this paper proposes a flexible framework for CALL development that takes the interrelations between approach, content, and technology-based variables into account. It contends that some of these variables are predetermined by the educational context, whereas others reflect the developers’ views of what constitutes an optimal language learning environment. The main part of the paper provides a detailed account of how these development factors shaped the design of multimedia materials for a large-scale project at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. It argues for a balanced approach to learner control that, while allowing learners to interact with the materials according to their needs and preferences, provides enough learner guidance for those who prefer a more structured approach to learning. Special attention is paid to the often problematical areas of learner style suitability, feedback, and transparency of structure and content.

This study examines the possible effects of a mailing list discussion on second/foreign language learning in the form of an explorative case study. Forty-six students in an elementary-level Japanese language class at a Canadian university participated. The study consists of three parts: interaction analysis, content analysis, and a student survey. The first two parts referenced the entire mailing list discussion archive. The number of the messages totaled 298. In order to analyze learner interaction, a map of interaction was designed and Levin, Kim and Riel’s (1990) Intermessage Reference Analysis (IRA) was applied. Content analysis was then carried out on the topics, context-type, and depth of learning process involved in each message. Lastly, a survey was distributed in order to discern participants’ perceptions towards the use of a mailing list for language learning. The results of the interaction and content analysis show how a mailing list discussion can provide a place to reflect on course content, enabling students to increase their linguistic knowledge through an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and opinions via student-centered interactions. The result of the participant survey shows that although the students’ participation in and perceptions towards the mailing discussion is not uniform, 35% of the students perceived the value of a mailing list discussion to be high. Through the examination of three different methods of analysis, the study concludes that there is a good potential for the use of mailing list discussions in second/foreign language learning. However, further research is necessary to determine which factors contribute to the successful use of this medium.

Research, design, implementation, and evaluation of CALL materials needs to be based on sound SLA theories and research. A research agenda of CALL issues needs to be identified and investigated by means of suitable methodology. I propose that a Sociocultural approach to language learning provides a useful theoretical framework to investigate the process of collaborative activity in computer-mediated tasks. Following a brief overview of Sociocultural theory in relation to its claims about the usefulness of collaborative activity in the language classroom, I provide an account of issues to be addressed in task design. Finally, I exemplify from a study currently taking place how collaborative activity in computer-mediated tasks can be empirically studied, and I outline some of the methodological considerations underpinning such research work.

There has of late been a call among language practitioners for the sophisticated new markup language XML to be used in Web-based tools for language learning (Mills, 1999; Riley, 2001; Godwin-Jones, 2000). This paper describes just such an application: the development of an interactive electronic resource book of learning tasks for English Language Teaching (ELT). The electronic resource book incorporates an authenticity-centred approach to language learning materials design, viz language learning based on authentic texts complemented by authentic tasks. The paper covers a general introduction to XML, describes the pedagogical model (i.e. the authenticity-centred approach) that it was used to realise, and describes the development of the XML-based system operating the electronic resource book. Among the conclusions of this paper are that this trial application reveals XML to be ideally suited to the realisation of such pedagogical models and that its greatly enhanced information management and linking potential promises an exciting future in the field of language teaching by providing the possibility for pedagogy-led technology rather than technology-led pedagogy.

Previous research has underscored the role of negotiation in providing appropriate conditions for second language acquisition. Varonis and Gass (1985b), in a study of English as a Second Language (ESL), found greater amount of negotiation in non-native–non-native interaction than in native-non–native interaction. Given the increased interest in computer mediated communication and in its applications to language learning, this investigation explores whether those results are obtained when using an electronic written medium. This study compared the negotiations generated by dyads of non-native speakers (NNS–NNS), native speakers (NS–NS), and non-native and native speakers (NNS–NS), in the oral and written modes. The results revealed that the NNS–NS group negotiated in the oral mode significantly more than in the written mode; this group also negotiated significantly more than the other two groups in the oral mode. Learners' shared social and linguistic background seemed to have facilitated the comprehension of input. Conversely, lack of familiarity with native speaker's pronunciation seemed to have caused more breakdowns in the oral conversations of the mixed dyads. Though the results of this study suggest that negotiation is not the main resource to obtain modified input in a foreign language context, other learning strategies that may be beneficial in the language learning process were at use in learner-learner interaction.

This article investigates commercial software design practices as they specifically relate to foreign language education. Commercial educational software companies currently produce the majority of language learning software available on the market. Commercial ventures producing CALL software share many design practices that call into question their educational validity. The design practices of commercial CALL software companies are incongruent with the goals of foreign language education. The problems associated with commercial CALL ventures can be seen in the cultural aspects of the programs, particularly when dealing with issues of cultural authenticity and representation. Practices that create these cultural problems are investigated and outlined in this article. The results of these problems are also highlighted to allow for better identification of problematic design practices. The identification of these problems is associated with educational software evaluation theory. A brief outline of educational software evaluation theory is given, as well as a proposal for a new framework for CALL software evaluation that incorporates issues of representation to better address the inaccuracies found in many commercial CALL software products.