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 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.

A multimedia learning environment would appear to benefit from an intelligent tutoring system that draws on didactic expertise, knowledge of the program structure, and knowledge of the learner's previous activities. On the other hand, one may argue against a tutor because of the damaging effects on learner autonomy: the tutor may hamper genuine learning by taking the learner by the hand, whereas what the learner needs is to have sufficient space to move freely through material in an explorative rather than an executive mode, generating her own queries and finding her own solutions. It is argued that tutoring may be a necessary stage on the road to autonomy.

Corpus consultation with concordancers has been recognized as a promising way for learners to study and explore language features such as collocations at their own pace and in their own time. This study examined 1.5 million search queries sent to a collocation consultation tool called FlaxCLS (Flexible Language Acquisition Collocation Learning System; http://flax.nzdl.org) over a period of two years to identify learners’ collocation look-up patterns. This paper examines and characterizes learners’ look-up patterns as they entered search queries, clicked on the query formation aids provided by the system, and navigated through the different levels of collocation information returned by the system to support collocation learning. We looked at how learners formulated query terms, and we analyzed the characteristics of query words learners entered, the characteristics of collocations they preferred, and the sample sentences they checked. Our collocation look-up pattern analyses, similar to traditional user query analyses of the web, provide interesting and revealing insights that are hard to obtain from small-scale user studies. The findings provide valuable information and pedagogical implications for data-driven learning (DDL) researchers and language teachers in designing tailored collocation consultation systems and activities. This paper also presents multidimensional analyses of learner query data, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been explored in DDL research.

This paper details the development of a multidialectical text-to-speech (TTS) application, Sintéiseoir, for the Irish language. This work is being carried out in the context of Irish as a lesser-used language, where learners and other L2 speakers have limited direct exposure to L1 speakers and speech communities, and where native sound systems and vocabularies can be seen to be receding even among L1 speakers – particularly the young.

Sintéiseoir essentially implements the diphone concatenation model, albeit augmented to include phones, half-phones and, potentially, other phonic units. It is based on a platform-independent framework comprising a user interface, a set of dialect-specific tokenisation engines, a concatenation engine and a playback device.

The tokenisation strategy is entirely rule-based and does not refer to dictionary look-ups. Provision has been made for prosodic processing in the framework but has not yet been implemented. Concatenation units are stored in the form of WAV files on the local file system.

Sintéiseoir’s user interface (UI) provides a text field that allows the user to submit a grapheme string for synthesis and a prompt to select a dialect. It also filters input to reject graphotactically invalid strings, restrict input to alphabetic and certain punctuation marks found in Irish orthography, and ensure that a dialect has, indeed, been selected.

The UI forwards the filtered grapheme string to the appropriate tokenisation engine. This searches for specified substrings and maps them to corresponding tokens that themselves correspond to concatenation units.

The resultant token string is then forwarded to the concatenation engine, which retrieves the relevant concatenation units, extracts their audio data and combines them in a new unit. This is then forwarded to the playback device.

The terms of reference for the initial development of Sintéiseoir specified that it should be capable of uttering, individually, the 99 most common Irish lemmata in the dialects of An Spidéal, Músgraí Uí Fhloínn and Gort a’ Choirce, which are internally consistent dialects within the Connacht, Munster and Ulster regions, respectively, of the dialect continuum. Audio assets to satisfy this requirement have already been prepared, and have been found to produce reasonably accurate output. The tokenisation engine is, however, capable of processing a wider range of input strings and when required concatenation units are found to be unavailable, returns a report via the user interface.

We report on how technological developments have enabled us to change our concepts and practices regarding voice and text coaching and how this in turn has raised the level of literary competence among non-native doctoral students seeking publication in English in scientific journals. We describe models for marking, peer reviewing and coaching spoken delivery and written text. Our models spring from our dedicated physical CALL environment and take into account learner expectations and further develop tangible learner strategies. As our models are applied in an open learning platform they are accessible, interactive and facilitate both differentiated progressive feedback and student profiling. The four skills are revisited through very traditional means in a methodological paradigm requiring some ‘new literacy’. Between 1997 and 2000 we were devoted to developing and testing our dedicated physical CALL classroom model; in the period 2000–2003 we have 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 KULeuven in 1997) informs the focus of our research. During the latter period, the resulting models have been rigorously tested by about three hundred KULeuven students, half of whom are post graduates and half of whom 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 and active retrieval, plus transfer issues versus knowledge gap issues. The discussion centres on further model development integration.

This presentation is a discursive treatment of the migration of a classroom based translation class to online delivery using the Virtual Learning Environment WebCT. The main focus is not on the VLE itself, but on the pedagogical challenges posed by the move to online delivery and the course structure developed to retain as many of the advantages of face-to-face delivery as possible. Key to this is the use of an innovative colour-coding system of error analysis combined with constructivist comments designed to promote reflection on the translation process. The application of colour-coded feedback to categories relevant to translation training is flexible and can be adapted to other disciplines where essay-type answers are appropriate and differentiated comment by the tutor is expected. Since translation is a process-heavy activity rather than content rich, special attention has been paid to pedagogical considerations. Emphasis is also placed on using the VLE to build up a durable learning resource. The advantages and weaknesses of both forms of delivery are compared.

The history of computer-aided language learning (CALL) dates back some 40 years. During this period two main types of system have been developed: frame-based and intelligent. These two types of programs are examined in turn below.

Both economic pressure - the need to accommodate ever greater numbers of foreign language learners, the increasing demand for distance education - and the educational desirability of self-directed learning have stimulated a great surge of research and practical interest in learner autonomy. And there is little doubt that information technology will be called upon, is already being called upon, to play a major role in the teaching profession's efforts to encourage foreign language learners towards self-reliance and to capitalize on the present appeal of computers. But what do we mean by ‘self-reliance’. What do we mean by ‘autonomy’? And what is the relationship between computer-induced motivation and learning?

A quality-based authoring tool is defined by its ability to satisfy its users’ needs. In the design and use of such tools in CALL, however, very little reliable information exists about what the tutoring system really does, for example concerning its capacity to create ‘interactive’ lessons. Linked to this, many teachers lack the time and resources to keep up with the latest technological developments, and invariably feel they are under exploiting the possibilities of CALL. This paper proposes a typology of different types of CALL-based interactivity and interaction to help teachers better assess the possibilities of network-based multimedia authoring tools. In adopting a general social constructivist approach, the system of classification looks at how one can link different learning styles, in this case that of Mumford & Honey (1992) Learning Styles, to different types of: (1) on-line learner accompaniment; (2) evaluation of learner production; (3) organised structures of events/states (scenation); (4) data organisation; (5) information units; (6) frequency of choice; (7) choices made available to learners. Finally, a multimedia authoring system, LEM of Speaker (Intranet version 3.30) will serve as a demonstration of the importance of this mode of evaluation to the design and understanding of such authoring tools in CALL.

The concept of communicative CALL has tended to suffer from a lack of definition. This article seeks a redefinition of communicative CALL by focussing on the interaction actually produced by learners through the use of software. A framework is proposed for planning communicative CALL which takes the target interaction as its starting point. Classroom research is presented as an example of how the framework could be used in practice, and the interaction produced by one item of software is evaluated.

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.