EUROCALL 2001, held at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, included more than a hundred presentations. Out of these, twenty papers were submitted and twelve of these were selected for inclusion in this issue of ReCALL containing the Selected Papers. Due to space constraints a further two papers have been held in reserve for the next issue. Additional material will be included in a CD-ROM to be produced by the conference organisers. See http://www.kun.nl/eurocall/index2.html for details.

The central question in this paper is whether Web technology has the potential to add value to face-to-face language teaching in the form of activities that cannot be realized fully in a traditional classroom. While arguments will be presented for and against e-learning, our conclusion is that the latest human-machine interfaces offer an environment for interactive learning that can foster the acquisition of communicative skills. The paper argues that one of the great strengths of the Web is the potential to engage students in creative information gap activities and real experiential learning in the form of meaningful, process-oriented projects in authentic settings. Evidence will be drawn from three sources:

[bull ] The current literature on new learning approaches.

[bull ] The latest best-practice applications, such as Webquests, Voice Chat, MOOs and innovative co-operative ventures.

[bull ] The findings of two large research studies by the author on students’ perceptions of Web-based language learning in school and tertiary settings.

The paper emphasises the importance of creating connectivity rather than content.

The objective of this paper is to describe a task-based project in tandem via e-mail, and to discuss the effects of motivation on task performance. In this project, a group of Irish students and a group of Spanish students are asked to carry out a series of tasks in collaboration with their tandem partners via e-mail by means of a web page especially designed for the project. Half the message is meant to be written in the student’s native language and half in the target language, and students are also encouraged to correct one another. The goal behind our research is to discuss the effects of motivation on task performance. We argue that resource directing (such as reasoning demands) and resource depleting factors (such as prior knowledge) which belong to task complexity in Robinson’s model (Robinson, 2001) are closely connected to affective variables which, as is the case with motivation, belong to task difficulty. Motivational factors like interest in the meanings to be exchanged, involvement in the decision-making process, students’ expertise in the topic, media and materials used, and the diffusion of outcomes among others have strong effects on task performance, and should therefore be considered together with complexity variables.

The paper presents the results of a comparative investigation of course developers’ and teacher trainees’ views regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of a multimedia self-tuition course designed to introduce foreign language teacher trainees to tools and methods for organising computer-assisted language learning. The paper first provides a brief description of the home-study course itself. It describes the course’s main components, its content as well as the learning and evaluation tasks the course provides in support of the learning process. Next, the paper reports on the way in which the evaluation project investigating teacher trainees’ and course developers’ views regarding the effectiveness of the course was set up. The project’s design is presented, and the way in which various procedures of data collection (written evaluations and individual interviews) were triangulated is commented on. In the third section we present the investigation’s main findings. The section focuses on points of agreement and disagreement between developers’ and trainees’ views regarding the usefulness and effectiveness of the course. Finally, we describe the changes brought about by the evaluation project, and reflect on the necessity to take account of future users’ views and requirements in the design and development process if the training of foreign language teachers is to benefit from web-based delivery.

The acquisition of foreign languages for specific purposes through e-learning strategies is one of the areas less researched and developed in the field of CALL. However, as a member of a recently completed Leonardo da Vinci Project, devoted to vocational training, the author will report on the findings of the Airline Talk project. The goals of the project were to supply materials which would promote continuing learning amongst airline staff in three target languages: English, German and Spanish. This paper focuses on the development, structure and language content of the Spanish courseware, ¡Bienvenido a bordo!, designed at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. The author discusses the process carried out by the project partners in order to satisfy learner demands in terms of learner orientation, process orientation and learner autonomy to achieve language competence through the development of communicative skills and interactivity. Issues that are described include: needs analysis, courseware specifications, exercise template design, graphical user interface and learner motivation. The results arising from the evaluation carried out at two different partner institutions will conclude the discussion.

‘Design’ is a term that is familiar to many language teachers and CALL practitioners. It is used regularly in relation to curriculum, syllabus, course and task in the general literature and it occurs in all these areas and more in the CALL sphere where instructional design, website design, interface design and screen design are just some of the additional points of focus. This paper aims to look at CALL design in more detail. It places a particular emphasis on describing the discourse, products and processes of design in CALL. It looks at what we have learnt about design and points to areas that remain problematical. It also makes connections with cognate fields whenever these links prove helpful. This study is the second in a series of three complementary papers which look at research, design and evaluation in CALL (see Levy, 2000). All use the same corpus of CALL work as a database and the research design and methodology in each is the same. In this paper the description and discussion is based on 93 articles involving design published in books and journals published in 1999. The descriptive section is followed by analysis and interpretation with special attention given to the relationship between theory and design, and the centrality of the task and the learner in the design process.

Student interest in films as a medium for ESL education is high. Interest, however, is not enough to foster understanding in a traditional classroom environment. A more hands-on interactive approach to studying a second language via film is needed. By using online interactive exercises to study the language and culture in film, students are able to gain a better understanding of the language used in the film. This paper outlines a course that was developed using online interactive exercises and film to study language and culture. The course incorporates several modern technologies to allow students to take an active role in their learning and to increase their skills in areas that the students perceive to be of value in the future, namely listening, reading, and presentation skills. Automated feedback functions let the students, as well as the instructors, constantly monitor their progress. These technologies allow a more efficient use of classroom time and permit the students to go into the content of the film – especially the cultural aspects – much more deeply. Through this course, students are able to boost their confidence and their motivation to continue the study of language and culture via films on their own

This paper considers the progressive integration of a web resource in a language degree option centred on language varieties and linguistic variation in French. It focuses on the features introduced by the web environment and how they can enhance the learning experience of the students. It addresses the issue of the language used for teaching and learning with diverse groups of students including a high proportion of non-native speakers of English, varying levels of linguistic competence and different stages of study. The paper also examines web-based facilities supporting interaction and collaboration among members of the learning group (some teacher moderated). The evaluation is based on the results of a survey conducted with the group of students who took part in the pilot implementation in 2000–01 and on module feedback. The last section in the paper points to ways of integrating further the technology within the delivery and the assessment of the module, and of increasing student support and interaction.

Authoring systems can be a great advantage for teachers concerned with tools created specifically for their learners. They allow the designer to conceive modules for a precise public. The designer, often the teacher himself, can model his work on existing CD-ROMs marketed for the general public, inserting information that is more specific to his own public. For L2 acquisition, this solution can be satisfactory if the teacher’s main preoccupation is to have learners work on the language at their own rhythm and in their own time. However, there are a few oversights to this type of conception which need to be resolved: (1) teacher access to the finished product, (2) student access to the different parts of the finished product, and (3) pedagogical and didactic criteria. This paper concerned with all three oversights, notably the last, concentrates on developing the characteristics of all four learning stages described by Narcy (1997), while illustrating the different theoretical and practical possibilities of incorporating these stages into modules created by teachers.

This paper examines staff reaction towards the use of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Communications and Information Technology (C&IT) in language learning and teaching. It considers the attitudes of colleagues in three different universities, two in the UK and one in Canada. Our findings suggest that staff in these three locations are not resistant to the use of computer technology in learning and teaching but rather that any hesitations they have are due to a range of different factors of a practical kind, ranging from time pressures to course relevance. We found that staff in one institution are clearly more enthusiastic about using CALL and C&IT than colleagues in the other two, but that they were also widely welcomed in the latter. One of the main reasons for this has been the creation of common learning environments on the Web. In addition, findings show that staff already convinced of the benefits that CALL and C&IT bring to the teaching and learning experience (radicals) have a role in encouraging their less enthusiastic colleagues to begin using this form of technology. However, we found that the majority of colleagues are not radicals, but pragmatists, and are willing to make use of CALL and C&IT provided that the benefits are clearly guaranteed. There remains a small minority of conservatives. No suggestions are made as to how to deal with them.

In this work we set out to investigate the feasibility of applying measures of lexical frequency to the assessment of the writing of learners of French. A system developed for analysing the lexical knowledge of learners, according to their productive use of high and low frequency words (Laufer and Nation 1995), was adapted for French and used to analyse learners’ texts from an Open University French course. Whilst we found that this analysis could not be said to reflect the state of the learners’ vocabulary knowledge in the same way that Laufer and Nation’s study did, elements of the system’s output did correlate significantly with scores awarded by human markers for vocabulary use in these texts. This suggests that the approach could be used for self-assessment. However, the feedback that can be given to learners on the basis of the current analysis is very limited. Nevertheless, the approach has the potential for refinement and when enhanced with information derived from successive cohorts of learners performing similar writing tasks, could be a first step in the development of a viable aid for learners evaluating their own writing.

Educators are more and more concerned to integrate human and computer capabilities as efficiently as possible. There is an increasing demand in language teaching for evidence on which to base decisions about use of this ever more prevalent tool. One main yardstick for evaluation of CALL is, naturally, the human teacher. Thus there is demand for comparative data. Attempts to provide such data in a way that allows useful generalisations to be made or accurate analyses of the outcomes are still comparatively limited and difficult to produce. Many attempts have been strongly criticised and the very concept of comparative studies of this kind has been attacked. The belief asserted here is that there is still a need for general studies in a variety of contexts. A longitudinal comparative study is reported that tries to take into account some of the major criticisms, while providing support for the idea that these kinds of study still need to continue. The study provides a detailed description of the design and implementation, an evaluation in terms of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) criteria, and pre and post tests to measure outcomes across a range of language learning tasks.

With innovative ways available to assess language performance through the use of computer technology, practitioners have to rethink their preferred strategies of language testing. It is necessary to take into account both the new developments in language learning and teaching research and also the latest features computers have to offer to help with language assessment. In addition to best practices developed over the years in the field, it is necessary for provision to be made for authentic assessments of intercultural communication abilities. After a review of the latest language-testing literature and a discussion of the current problems identified in it, this paper explores the latest developments in computer technology and proposes areas of language testing in the light of the new findings. A practical application follows. This is an adaptation, in a school board in Ontario, of the latest evaluation model. The model represents unit planning as an isosceles triangle with assessed assignments stacked in horizontal bands from the base to the vertex, i.e. the top. The suggestion is offered that this approach can be enriched, by changing the triangle into a pyramid with a different model on each side. Access to the four sides by rotation of the pyramid allows a broader range of activities culminating in one final assessment task at the summit.