This paper deals with the analysis of a communicative activity involving English learners of French, its advantages and drawbacks as well as the outcome that teachers can expect of such an activity. The first part examines some reasons, both theoretical and practical for using communication technology, particularly electronic mail, for promoting language acquisition and developing learner autonomy. The second pan of the paper deals with the theoretical framework within which the activity was carried out, that Is, Stephen Krashen's language acquisition theory which establishes a distinction between language acquisition and language learning. Email interaction offers the possibility of addressing both processes.

Grammar checkers are not reliable enough yet to be used in CALL programs. Their rate of overflagging is still much too high for learners of a foreign language. CALL programs, however, could profit greatly from the incorporation of a grammar checker if this could provide the option of responding more intelligently to students’ input. Several strategies are proposed to make grammar checkers more acceptable for CALL developers, among them adapting the lexicon and the parser in the grammar checker.

This discussion paper outlines some of the decisions and issues involved in creating and using authoring tools for language learning through the World Wide Web. In it, we outline the development of Hot Potatoes, our suite of authoring tools, and attempt to draw conclusions from our experience that will be valuable not only to other developers but also to evaluators and users of authoring software. Areas addressed include exercise design, ability to customise and control the output, support for different browser versions, user-interface design, ancillary technology and technical support.

This paper argues that CALL practitioners need to remain constantly aware of the political context in which they operate, so that they can the better exploit opportunities to win funding, gain status for their activities and generally succeed more often in the prime aim of enhancing the practice of language learning. It seeks to situate EUROCALL's own activity as an organisation at an important point of convergence in the global context. It concludes with some quasi political advice both for individuals and for the organisation as a whole.

This paper presents IDAZKIDE, a prototype of an intelligent language learning environment (ICALL) for learners of Basque. The philosophy of the system is to make different Natural Language Processing tools simultaneously accessible to students to help them (mainly at the morphological level) to write in Basque, as well as to give advice, taking into account some characteristics of the student gathered in a student model.

A diagnostic component for natural language utterances has been devised which allows one to integrate (possibly inconsistent) evidence from a wide range of knowledge sources into a unique decision procedure. It is based on a procedure for the disambiguation of dependency structures using graded constraints. Different description levels like syntax, semantics, and others are treated by separate structural representations, which are disambiguated simultaneously. Due to the complete symmetry of the system architecture the approach allows for the successful handling of a wide variety or student errors.

Dans le tout recent ouvrage New Technologies for learning: contribution of ICT to innovation in education, les auteurs rapprochent les merveilles multimédiatiques du mythe de Sisyphe:

“In the history of education the introduction of any new technological tool was accompanied with high expectations regarding its innovating power for learning and instruction. After a period of sporadic use, and some disappointment about the obtained learning outcomes, the arrival of any new technological tool generated a new set of expectations, limited use and resulting frustration. This is what we call the ‘Myth of Sisyphus’, the king of Corinth condemned for ever to roll his stone up a mountain in Hades only to have it roll down again when he neared the top.” (Dillemans, et al. 1998:41).

English listening ability has become increasingly important. Traditionally, the training of listening skills is mainly provided via tape-based language laboratories. However, the tape-based laboratory cannot cope with the rapid development of digital learning media. In addition, it fails to provide students with convenient access because of its limited space and opening hours. The faculty at National Taiwan Ocean University takes advantage of new Web technologies such as RealMedia and JavaScript to create a virtual language lab in the hope of helping students develop listening skills. This paper will discuss various problems and solutions in setting up a virtual language lab. It is expected that our experience will be useful for other language professionals.

Distance learning courses have been developed at City University over the last eight years. Language Plus, a semi-distance scheme was designed around the MBA programmes, which have little timetable space to spare (Connell & Pollard 1993). At the request of the Institute of Linguists, special syllabuses and examinations were devised for the Background Studies module of the Instite of Linguists, special syllabuses and examinations were devised for the Background Studies module of the Institute's ELIC Diploma in 1991. It was also a means of satisfying demand from students located elsewhere in Britain or abroad wishing to prepare for this particular module, but for whom no local course was available.

Experience in developing multimedia programs has found that reliance on commercial developers does not always produce suitable material in terms of pedagogic quality, whereas training content writers as programmers is costly. This paper examines attempts to solve this and illustrates important recent initiatives. The Open University is developing flexible activity-type shells which are content independent. This is matched by an object-oriented approach to the program itself for maximum re-usability. The MALTED project addresses the problem by providing sophisticated authoring tools, but also sets up an asset base to make available re-usable language resources, helping to avoid re-invention of too many wheels.

In this paper, we present the Web-based CALL environment (or WALL) which is currently being experimented with at the University of Paris 13 in the Computer Science Department of the Institut Universitaire de Technologie. Our environment is being developed to teach computer science (CS) English to CS French-speaking students, and will be extended to other languages for specific purposes such as, for example, English or French for banking, law, economics or medicine, where on-line resources are available.

English, and more precisely CS English is, for our students, a necessary tool, and not an object of study. The learning activities must therefore stimulate the students' interest and reflection about language phenomena. Our pedagogical objective, relying on research acquisition (Wokusch 1997) consists in linking various texts together with other documents, such as different types of dictionaries or other types of texts, so that knowledge can be acquired using various appropriate contexts.

Language teachers are not supposed to be experts in fields such as computer sciences or economics. We aim at helping them to make use of the authentic documents that are related to the subject area in which they teach English. As shown in Foucou and Kübler (1998) the wide range of resources available on the Web can be processed to obtain corpora, i.e. teaching material. Our Web-based environment therefore provides teachers with a series of tools which enable them to access information about the selected specialist subject, select appropriate specialised texts, produce various types of learning activities and evaluate students' progress.

Commonly used textbooks Tor specialised English offer a wide range of learning activities, but they are based on documents that very quickly become obsolete, and that are sometimes widely modified. Moreover, they are not adaptable to the various levels of language of the students. From the students' point of view, working on obsolete texts that are either too easy or too difficult can quickly become demotivating, not to say boring.

In the next section, we present the general architecture of the teaching/learning environment; the method of accessing and using it, for teachers as well as for students, is then described. The following section deals with the actual production of exercises and their limits. We conclude and present some possible research directions.

This paper discusses the findings of an extensive survey of approaches to language teaching and learning via the WWW. Its aim was to find exemplars of best practice in stand-alone courses, integrated mixed-model courses (Web/CD-ROM/face-to-face), and interactive exercises for the development of all four language learning skills. The findings suggest that, in some languages, resources are already so plentiful that it would be more economical to integrate the best of them into existing courses and to focus energies on global co-operation in the production of new high quality materials.

This paper takes the form of a proposal for a computer mediated language course delivered at a distance and administered jointly by two different institutions, the universities of British Columbia (UBC) and Auckland (UA). It examines the possible institutional context(s), the target group, gives a course description with a list of learning objectives, curriculum topics, a description of the course's epistemology, design, development plan, delivery methods and student support, and offers a justification for the development of the course. In conclusion, the paper looks into the possible strengths of such a course as well as the challenges of implementation.

This paper makes a case for a style of CALL in which learners engage in written ‘conversations’ with a computer, implemented by means of natural language processing techniques. These conversations involve using language as a tool for achieving goals through active communication rather than as the subject matter for language exercises. The paper goes on to discuss the design and implementation of prototype software developed to illustrate this approach, and reports on pilot observations of the software in use. However, many issues in the design and use of this approach remain to be clarified.

This paper presents the prototype of CALLex, a program for learning lexical functions, created by a project funded by INTAS, a European organisation promoting cooperation between the European Union and the states of the former Soviet Union, developed by the Laboratory of Computational Linguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, supported by the universities of Klagenfurt, Austria and Heidelberg, Germany. The goal of the program is to facilitate language learning through several linguistic games in order to improve the lexical command of the language studied. The CALLex games access a lexico-semantic database consisting of two dictionaries, Russian and German, each containing roughly 1000 lexemes. The lexical functions cover a wide variety of lexical relationships, which can be roughly divided into three major groups: (1) collocations, which are syntagmatic relationships, such as ‘do x, nave x, or being in the state of x’, (trade) = conduct (trade) or (anger) = feel (anger), (2) substitutions, i.e. paradigmatic relationships, e.g. ‘a lexeme whose meaning is opposite to x’, (appear) = disappear, (courage) = cowardice, and (3) other prototypical relationships, ‘head of what is denoted by x’, (university) = rector, (tribe) = chief. While studying the combinatorial capabilities of a word and its most ‘idiomatic’ collocations, the student can get a feel for semantic fields and obtain structured access to the vocabulary and its syntactic expression in the foreign language. The strict separation of the CALL program and the underlying database facilitates the expansion of the linguistic resources on the one hand and the adaptation or the linguistic games to new didactic approaches on the other hand. This paper highlights the function of the database in the background of the program and the treatment of illrormed student input. Although some adjustments were made during the course of the project, a more flexible approach seems necessary. Here we envisage a component separate from, but interacting with the database, allowing for a more robust treatment of ill-formed input.

This paper examines the range of different factors which in our experience contribute to student resistance to the use of computers for language learning. These problems relate to aspects of the computing environment, social and psychological factors and issues relating to the curriculum and teaching methods. We have made basic suggestions about ways of overcoming these resistances. However our principal finding is that the most effective and coherent way of fostering student adoption of CALL is to develop a computer based learning environment, which draws on the success of communications software and the Internet, based on the computer conferencing program First Class.