Contained within this special issue is a selection of papers presented at the 2004 annual EUROCALL conference, hosted in early September in Vienna, Austria. CALL Austria, which is part of the great EUROCALL family, has played a major role in disseminating pedagogical approaches towards TELL and CALL within Europe since the early 1980s. It has always been a grass-roots movement, and its work has always reflected that fact that CALL Austria is run by active teachers, many of them teaching at secondary level. Thus the application of new ideas in the language classroom was a major consideration in the preparation of the 2004 Conference. In this context welcoming Eurocallers to Vienna in 2004 has been a crowning achievement and a reward for our attempts to promote the meaningful use of computer technologies in language learning. “TELL and CALL in the Third Millenium: Pegagogical Approaches in a Growing EU-Community”, focussed on the great variety of concepts, applications and best-practice models concerning pedagogy and methodology supported by technological developments, particularly in relation to language learning and teaching. As in previous conferences sub-themes focussed on the changes in practices involving literacy brought about by the World Wide Web; the need to re-interpret current teaching paradigms; the relationship between the more ‘traditional’ language skills and the ‘new literacies’; interactivity, learner interaction and feedback; and spoken and written corpora in language teaching and learning.

A bibliometric approach is used not only to sketch out the development of CALL during the last 25 years, but also to assess the contribution of educational technology to 21st century foreign-language teaching and learning. This study is based on the six instalments of the author’s International (and multilingual) Bibliography of Computer Assisted Language Learning and the 5,301 entries contained therein. The once text-based bibliography has been transformed into a searchable database. Since index terms to describe both the contents and the nature of individual publications have been attached to the bibliographic data, it is now possible to query whether the 25,000 descriptors cluster around certain topics and to depict developments chronologically. The statistical evaluation of a large corpus also avoids the pitfalls of selective interpretation. Recent controversies about the chronologisation of CALL events as well as the internal consistency of such time chunks are addressed. The data suggest that the online/offline divide occurs around 1993 and that the latest additions to the foreign language teacher’s tool box – from e-mails to voicechats – overcome the language acquisition/language learning barrier. New and student-oriented forms of dealing with foreign language learning come to the fore. This has induced some researchers to concentrate on events where conversation breaks down, because learners must then ask for modified input or negotiate the meanings of lexical items. Such a strategy promises success in instructed second-language acquisition. It is suggested, however, that the foreign language teacher’s intervention is a necessary complement to second-language developmental processes. Educational technology may allow the teacher to let nature run its course nowadays. But when nature is unsympathetic to the cause of foreign language learning the teacher must rein in the student’s language acquisition device to protect him or her from certain sanctions the target community holds in store for the unsuccessful learner.

The symbolic location of EUROCALL's 2004 conference in Vienna offered to both new members from Eastern Europe and established members from the West an opportunity to review the relationship between computer assisted language learning (CALL) and language teaching in general. CALL is defined as an ‘academic field that explores the role of information and communication technologies in language learning and teaching’ (EUROCALL 1999; for a discussion of CALL as an interdisciplinary research domain, see Levy, 1997). CALL practitioners and researchers have long been aware of the importance of recognition within the broader discipline of language learning and teaching, as the joint EUROCALL/CALICO/IALL Research Policy Statement (EUROCALL 1999) explicitly noted. Yet CALL in fact remains marginalised in several ways which this article will explore. In seeking to promote more effective dissemination of good teaching practices and especially of research in CALL, the article will evoke the UKÕs predominant role in introducing Quality Assurance (QA) to higher education teaching and research – a trend which the Bologna Process will surely intensify throughout Europe. The author will draw on his current role as language research coordinator at the UK's Open University, and on substantial experience as a QA insider in both teaching and research, to analyse successes and failures in dissemination of both research and good teaching/learning practices. He will propose strategies for moving CALL from the margins towards the centre of language learning. In so doing, he will also provide an incidental overview of some key journals and conferences in the domain.

In this paper we present the Report Manager of our Web-based tutoring system for German – an interface to a persistent learner report that students can inspect and manipulate. The learner report collects and retains information on the learner’s progress and performance that is saved between visits. It also provides access to a journaling system that records prior inputs along with detailed error analysis, and a bookmarking system that tracks exercise completion. Finally, results can be printed or emailed to an instructor. In the Fall semester 2003, we conducted a study with 87 learners of German to investigate how their study habits are affected by an inspectable learner report. Our study indicates that students reviewed their learner profiles frequently – 33 times on average over the course of a semester – and that 70% of the students repeated exercises after having inspected their learner profile. So, while detailed user profiles and performance tracking are invaluable tools for CALL researchers, our study suggests that students also utilize and are influenced by the information.

The potential of corpora for language learning and teaching has been widely acknowledged and their ready availability on the Web has facilitated access for a broad range of users, including language teachers and learners. However, the integration of corpora into general language learning and teaching practice has so far been disappointing. In this paper, I will argue that the shape of many existing corpora, designed with linguistic research goals in mind, clashes with pedagogic requirements for corpus design and use. Hence, a ‘pedagogic mediation of corpora’ is required (cf. Widdowson, 2003). I will also show that the realisation of this requirement touches on both the development of appropriate corpora and the ways in which they are exploited by learners and teachers. I will use a small English Interview Corpus (ELISA) to outline possible solutions for a pedagogic mediation. The major aspect of this is the combination of two approaches to the analysis and exploitation of a pedagogically relevant corpus: a corpus-based and a discourse-based approach.

With computer corpora firmly established as research tools in linguistics, their application for language teaching purposes is also increasingly advocated to the extent that corpus-based language teaching has even been praised as the new revolution in language teaching (cf. Sinclair, 2004b). This article takes a more critical view and examines some of the potential as well as the limitations of computer corpora in the language classroom, providing practical examples from the British Component of the International Corpus of English. It is argued that only a balanced view, which takes into account both the strengths and weaknesses of computer corpora for language teaching, can ensure their successful integration into the language classroom. The discussion first focuses on the limitations of corpus data, which are identified as ‘externalized’, as opposed to ‘internalized’ language, lacking contextual, as opposed to co-textual, information. On the other hand, computer corpora provide access to information not easily available from other sources, viz. information on frequency of occurrence in various text types, and co-occurrence patterns, e.g. collocation, colligation, semantic prosody). This information, however, also has to be seen in the light of the more general questions of how representative corpus results are and to what extent they are generalisable. The article concludes with a discussion of pedagogical implications of the use of computer corpora, especially with regard to their application as tools for exploratory/discovery learning and as means for promoting learner autonomy.

An analysis of the characteristics of education and educational institutions of the third millennium shows that predominant features are flexibility, inclusiveness, collaboration, authenticity, relevance and extended institutional boundaries. Roles of both students and teachers have changed significantly as educational goals have broadened to include lifelong learning, global interaction, the acquisition of meta-cognitive knowledge and skills, and processes include negotiated curricula and real-life tutors and informants. This is a demanding package that appears to lead us naturally to a social constructivist paradigm for learning and teaching. While few would dispute the value of this approach in humanistic terms, a series of dilemmas – social, conceptual, political, pedagogical – have been articulated. The author will demonstrate that although these are not insurmountable, addressing them has major time implications. The paper argues that to free up time we need to combine social constructivist activities with cognitive constructivist ones, incorporating personalised ICALL systems.

This paper outlines the findings of a research project studying the effects of task modification on learner interaction when using email. Taking as its starting point interactionalist theories of SLA, it argues that if those interactional features characteristic of negotiation of meaning which have been identified as promoting SLA are to be preserved when tasks are transferred from a face-to-face spoken environment to a computer-mediated written asynchronous environment, then modifications to the tasks need to be made.

This paper describes some of the pedagogical and technical issues involved in adopting a hybrid approach to CALL materials development. It illustrates some of these issues with reference to a vocational CALL project, LANCAM, which took such a hybrid approach. It describes some of the benefits and considerations involved in hybrid development and evaluates the commercial web development tool, ‘Dreamweaver’ and its extension application ‘Coursebuilder’, which was used to author the LANCAM materials. It argues for a reconsideration of generic web development tools in CALL authoring and also for language experts to be actively involved in the instructional design process.

People learning a new language have problems with various aspects of the language they want to learn – with its grammar, with its pronunciation, with its morphology... CALL tools have been provided for most of these linguistic levels, but comparatively little has been done about helping students with problems of meaning. We will argue that language technology is now mature enough to support tools that address at least some semantic issues, and we will describe a tool that attempts to provide appropriate support for a specific class of learners.