Like a good deal of change in education, the integration of digital technologies into language teaching and learning has a tendency to be a slow moving, often uncertain, process, whose advance is punctuated by a series of political, administrative and educational filters. These operate at both a global (i.e. international and/or national) and local (i.e. regional and/or institutional) level. Like a train setting off from its departure point travelling towards a final destination – the “normalisation” of CALL perhaps, where computer technology becomes “an integral part of every lesson, like a pen or a book” (Bax 2003: 23) – we all see this process from the unique standpoint of our own institution, though in fact our journey takes place simultaneously within regional, national and international boundaries. Departure and arrival points will inevitably differ: delays may vary, but are to be expected. And although the view from the window, including the stations we stop off at, might look very similar, even identical at times, we will invariably recount different experiences at the end of our journeys – assuming, of course, we ever arrive!

The use of technology in language teaching and learning has been the focus of a number of recent research review studies, including developments in technology and CALL research (Zhao, 2003), CALL as an academic discipline (Debski, 2003), ICT effectiveness (Felix, 2005), and subject characteristics in CALL research (Hubbard, 2005), to name a few. Such studies have contributed to clarifying how language learning technologies have been investigated, but questions remain regarding how these technologies have been used in achieving learning objectives. In other words, what technologies do CALL practitioners select for the teaching of a certain language skill or area such as listening, grammar or pronunciation? Are the decisions to use these technologies made on pedagogical grounds, or alternatively, are there other aspects that are more instrumental in influencing what is used in the language classroom? The purpose of this study is to review the literature to examine what technologies are used in the teaching of the language skills and areas. All empirical research articles appearing in four major English-language journals in the field of CALL (CALICO Journal, CALL, Language Learning & Technology, and ReCALL) from 2001 to 2005 were examined and the results collated to determine (1) what types of technologies are being used in the teaching of specific language skills and areas, (2) whether researchers had a clear idea in mind regarding their choice of technology or technologies in relation to their learning objectives, and (3) whether the researchers attempted to capitalise upon the features inherent in the technology or technologies as opposed to traditional, non-CALL means. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between technology and pedagogical goals.

This paper is a descriptive summary of a research project on blended learning in the Faculty of Arts at the University Complutense Madrid. The project was conducted as action research in 2002-06 by the research group LEETHi. LEETHi’s projects focus on the teaching of literature from an intercultural perspective while helping to develop new media competence. The project also addresses – among other objectives – the intercultural potential of literary tests used in second language acquisition where their practical applications include the development and use of digital material for the study of European literatures with the integration of multiple languages and perspectives. A central issue is the potential of blended learning (i.e. the integration of e-learning and contact learning) and the development of autonomy and communication between students and instructor. The online scenario focuses on the performance of tasks following sociocultural and constructivist theories and concepts borrowed from research on multimodality.

This paper presents FipsOrtho, a spell checker targeted at learners of French, and a corpus of learners’ errors which has been gathered to test the system and to get a sample of specific language learners’ errors. Spell checkers are a standard feature of many software products, however they are not designed for specific language learners’ errors. After a brief review of the state of the art, we describe the system’s architecture and interfaces. Then we describe our error typology and detail the techniques used to retrieve words and to order proposals appropriately: alphacode, phoneticization, ad-hoc, capitalization, apostrophe, and word separation error methods. Proposals are sorted by a score depending on the method(s) used to retrieve them, on the expected lexical category, gender, number and person, and on the string proximity with the unknown word. Then the test results are presented: a list of individual words containing errors was submitted to the alphacode and phoneticization methods; a corpus of authentic learners’ errors was gathered and analyzed. Finally we conclude the paper with some limitations of the system and ideas for future research.

Despite the increase of teacher preparation programs that emphasize the importance of training teachers to select and develop appropriate computer-assisted language learning (CALL) materials, integration of CALL into classroom settings is still frequently relegated to the use of selected CALL activities to supplement instruction or to provide additional practice. For the most part, we are still quite a way from what Bax (2003) calls the normalization stage of CALL, i.e., the stage where CALL becomes invisible and truly integrated. Podcasting, a new method of delivering on-demand audio and video files via the Web, shows promise as a technology that may allow teachers to expand the confines of their classrooms, and is becoming increasingly popular in educational contexts. Current use of podcasting in education remains, however, limited primarily to the delivery of recorded lectures in a portable, online format. We believe podcasting has the potential to not only act as a rich source of input and instruction for students in the language classroom, but also to transform instruction. Consequently, this paper describes a structured attempt to integrate CALL activities in the form of podcasts into an academic English as a Second Language (ESL) course on listening strategies. Preliminary evaluation of this ongoing project suggests that both the teacher and the students find the podcasts to be a positive component of the course.

This study was carried out in a language centre, in French higher education. Teachers and researchers had contrived a pedagogical system labeled guided autonomy which combined class attendance in groups and self-study in the self-study room. This kind of autonomous and technologically enhanced learning system will be referred to as CAALL (Computer Assisted Autonomous Language Learning) in this paper. To investigate and reflect critically on the students’ practices in CAALL, it was decided to carry out an extensive triangular study, cross-checking different data (Raby, 2003, 2005). The data pertained to what students did (physical behaviors while working), and to how they felt about it (verbal behaviors in the form of journals). Six students volunteered to take part in that experience. They were observed six times consecutively while working autonomously. In addition, we analyzed the journals in which they wrote about their feelings in connection with the CAALL system. From the students’ observations, three strategic models emerged (epistemic, procedural and mixed). From the journal analyses, different motivational attitudes appeared, ranging from enthusiastic appraisal to stark rejection. One unexpected result yielded by the triangular approach was the importance of internal factors (the learners’ characteristics) versus external factors (the learners' environment) in the process of appropriation of the new learning system.

Computer-mediated-communication (CMC) tools allowing learners to be in contact with native speakers of their target language in other locations are becoming increasingly flexible, often combining different modes of communication in a single web- and internet-based environment. The literature on telecollaborative exchanges reveals, however, that online intercultural communication between language learners “often fails to achieve the intended pedagogical goals” (O’Dowd & Ritter, 2006:624) and warns that “exposure and awareness of difference seem to reinforce, rather than bridge, feelings of difference” (Kern, 2000:256). Yet, research into the reasons for lack of success in CMC-based partnership-learning has, so far, only been carried out on a relatively small scale (see, for example, Thorne, 2005, Ware, 2005, O’Dowd & Ritter, 2006). In autumn 2005, students of French at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA and adult learners of French at the Open University (OU), UK were joined by native French speakers studying for an MA in distance education at the Université de Franche Comté (UFC), France in a pilot Tridem project in which all participants worked on the completion of a series of collaborative tasks. The Tridem partners met over several weeks in an internet-mediated, audio-graphic conferencing environment. The project output, a shared reflection in French and English on cultural similarities and differences, took the form of several collaborative blogs. The paper draws on data from pre- and post-questionnaires, from the work published by the learners in the blogs and from post-treatment, semi-structured interviews with volunteer participants. Beyond considering some of the known factors influencing success and failure in CMC-based collaborations such as discrepancies in target language competence among learners, this article also explores affective issues and difficulties arising from varying levels of multimodal communicative competence. The insights gained are mapped against O’Dowd and Ritter’s (2006) ‘inventory of pitfalls’ in telecollaboration. The result is a tentative framework which allows those involved in setting up and running telecollaborative exchanges to gauge both degree and nature of some of the risks they are likely to encounter.

Efforts have been made by language educators and researchers to use computer technology to assist L2 learners’ growth in either linguistic or intercultural competence. Nonetheless, web-based environments devoted to developing both types of competences in tandem are new and experimental. The purpose of this project, which involves the collaboration of EFL educators and computer engineers in Taiwan, is to establish an innovative web-based environment to support students in tertiary levels to develop both types of competences. This web-based EFL learning environment experiments with a few main features: (1) instead of reading articles about a foreign culture, the users of this website read articles about their native culture; (2) two on-line computer-based support tools, a bilingual concordancer and a dictionary, are made available to provide students with contextual supports for language learning; and (3) discussion boards are provided for intercultural communication. The web-based learning environment contains several instructional units. While working on a unit, students read an article and then answer comprehension and vocabulary questions. After reading, students share their responses to the articles with intercultural conversation partners via online forums. To evaluate the effectiveness of the learning environment, the researcher recruited a group of Taiwanese university students to test-use the system. Frequencies of the uses of the two e-referencing tools were calculated. The students’ responses to a questionnaire were examined and informal interviews with the students were conducted. Finally, the students’ forum entries were analyzed. The findings revealed initial interest in using e-referencing tools but a dramatic decrease in use after the first few units had been completed. The students used the concordancer as a link to extensive reading materials and suggested adding pronunciation tools to the dictionary. Questionnaire findings showed that students were generally satisfied with the design of the web-based learning environment. An analysis of the students’ forum entries revealed increases in the length and complexity of sentences in their writings, as well as reductions in grammatical errors, as more units were completed. As for intercultural learning, the content analysis of the forum entries demonstrated different types of intercultural competences. Based on the findings, some implications for revision of the virtual environment to enable more effective learning of English as a foreign language and greater development of intercultural competence are drawn.