This paper explores the motivation and prerequisites for successful integration of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) tools into current foreign language teaching and learning (FLTL) practice. We focus on two aspects, which we argue to be important for effective ICALL system development and use: (i) the relationship between activity design and restrictions needed to make natural language processing tractable and reliable, and (ii) pedagogical considerations and the influence of activity design choices on the integration of ICALL systems into FLTL practice.

French learners at university meet difficulties in the comprehension of oral English. Being in a formal context of language learning, they need to develop language awareness to compensate for insufficient exposure to the English language.

To meet the students’ needs, data was collected in order to pinpoint the main errors made by French learners in listening tasks. The errors were then analyzed and put into perspective with the system of oral English; a connection clearly appeared between the errors and what is barely heard or cannot be heard in reference to written English, hinting at what could cause poor oral comprehension. Three areas of knowledge appeared to be missing in the students’ background: the links between morpho-syntax and phonology, the mastery of phonological data found in dictionaries and the possible recourse to strategies in order to compensate for what has not been heard properly. These issues were addressed in an on-line program designed for non-beginners of English at university.

This paper deals with the assessment of the progress made by users of the program in a formal learning situation. Two groups of learners were considered: students whose major is English, and students for whom the study of English is optional. Two series of tests were implemented, before and after the use of the program. The tests focused on the ability of learners to read IPA transcription, to count syllables in oral English, and to pronounce auxiliaries and prepositions in different contexts.

The results to be discussed establish that the two groups of learners significantly improved their knowledge of oral English. Of particular interest is the fact that, even if the two groups had significantly different knowledge of oral English before using the program, with non-specialists of English having poorer knowledge, the two groups obtain similar results on the post-test, showing greater progress on the part of the non-specialists. All learners appear to improve dramatically their knowledge of IPA and their ability to use it.

The progress measured by the tests was corroborated by other modes of assessment: a survey on the students’ judgment as regards the usefulness of the program, and individual interviews focusing on what the students recall from the content of the program. In the latter, the students used relevant meta-linguistic and meta-cognitive expressions, showing their ability for further progress in developing listening abilities in English as a Second Language (ESL).

This article describes the anatomy and dynamics of an online professional development activity, the Moodle fishbowl. The fishbowl was designed as an opportunity for experienced EFL educators to witness and make sense of instructional conversation strategies that they might themselves use as they migrate their EFL courses to blended and eventually fully online venues, venues where the roles and dynamics of interaction are decidedly different than those in the live classroom. A major emphasis in this professional development sequence was to raise faculty awareness of the unique affordances on which they, as experienced language educators, might capitalize through observation of authentic examples of responsive online instructional strategies. To that end, three-week-long collaborations were established between participating faculty's EFL students and a ‘cultural expert’ in the US. The cultural experts were doctoral students in language technology who employed instructional conversation strategies with the EFL students as part of informal, authentic asynchronous threaded discourse topics. The role of the faculty in training was to observe these conversations by looking into the metaphorical fishbowl, reflect on the anatomy and impact of these online instructional conversations, and report back to the group as a whole. The following narrates the rationale, processes and outcomes of this Moodle fishbowl professional development sequence and suggests future considerations in supporting language educators as they move some or all of their instruction online.

Many studies about listening strategies are based on what learners report while listening to an oral message in the second language (Vandergrift, 2003; Graham, 2006). By recording a video of the computer screen while L2 learners (L1 French) were listening to an MP3-track in German, this study uses a novel approach and recent developments in computer technology to examine objectively what learners do while listening. The videos of the participants’ screens show the movements of the mouse and its time-course, and therefore the pauses and the backward or forward movements learners do in order to master their listening task. In this study, “self-regulation” indicates the capacity of the listener to exercise physical control over the listening input by using the mouse. Our point is that the recorded physical movements of the mouse during the listening task are a good indicator of metacognitive activity. This is independent of what the learner reports. The data and the time-courses of the mouse were then analyzed, from both a psycholinguistic and a linguistic point of view. This enabled us, on the one hand, to define a typology of listening strategies depending on the initial level of the participants and to show that, on the whole, the opportunity to have personal control over information input/intake does improve all the learners’ information processing. On the other hand, tracking the movements of the mouse while a learner individually listens to an oral text on a computer also has a methodological interest and equally allowed us to verify some precise research hypotheses about the links between linguistic features, for example, place of German compounds and final position of the verb in a subordinate clause, self-regulation strategies and comprehension.

This study introduces the educational assistant robots that we developed for foreign language learning and explores the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) which is in its early stages. To achieve this purpose, a course was designed in which students have meaningful interactions with intelligent robots in an immersive environment. A total of 24 elementary students, ranging in age from ten to twelve, were enrolled in English lessons. A pre-test/post-test design was used to investigate the cognitive effects of the RALL approach on the students’ oral skills. No significant difference in the listening skill was found, but the speaking skills improved with a large effect size at the significance level of 0.01. Descriptive statistics and the pre-test/post-test design were used to investigate the affective effects of RALL approach. The result showed that RALL promoted and improved students’ satisfaction, interest, confidence, and motivation at the significance level of 0.01.

A key role in the successful implementation of any learning approach is played by teachers, so how well blended learning works will depend largely on how well teachers make the transition from their traditional face-to-face classroom roles to the wider more complex role that blended learning requires. The additional skills and the forging of a new professional identity might not come easily to all practitioners.

This paper evaluates the impact that the introduction of blended learning in a distance language learning course has had on teachers. It presents and discusses findings from a small-scale evaluation study which compared quantitative and qualitative data gathered through a survey and a small number of interviews with participant observations from the researcher and the institutional end-of-course debriefing report.

The paper argues that whilst technological challenges and the sheer amount of change that teachers were faced with were largely responsible for some of the negative attitudes reflected in teachers’ opinions about the course, a less obvious, broader explanation for the difficulties that teachers encountered might be found in the way that learning, teaching and training are conceptualised by both teachers and the institution.

It is proposed that a transmission of knowledge approach to training fails to acknowledge and properly support the transformation of teachers’ identity that results from moving from traditional classroom-based teaching to online teaching. The shift goes beyond the acquisition of ICT skills and requires a pedagogical understanding of the affordances of the new medium and an acceptance by the teacher of his or her new role and identity.

This article describes the contradictions reported by student-teachers in Barcelona who engaged in telecollaboration with transatlantic peers via Second Life, during their initial training in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. The data analysis draws upon Grounded Theory and is theoretically informed by Activity Theory and the notion of contradictions. The study discusses technology-based, intra- and inter-institutional contradictions, their impact on the development of the telecollaborative activity, and outcomes in bolstering student-teachers’ conceptual understanding of Network-Based Language Instruction.

Oral communication ability has become increasingly important to many EFL students. Several commercial software programs based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies are available but their prices are not affordable for many students. This paper will demonstrate how the Microsoft Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK), a free but powerful tool, can be used to develop an oral skills training website for EFL students. This ASR-based website offers six different types of online exercises which allow students to practise their oral skills and obtain immediate feedback on their performance. A group of 25 college students and a group of 35 pre-service English teachers were invited to use the website. Two surveys were conducted to investigate the students’ and the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of this site. The results indicated that most teachers and students enjoyed using this website, which they felt could help improve their English oral skills. They also pointed out that the main strength of the ASR-based learning system is that it offers several different types of exercises which can encourage learners to produce more output in a low-anxiety environment. The major limitations of the website are the insufficient feedback and the challenging standards one must meet in order to achieve a pass mark. These findings can be useful for teachers who are interested in using ASR in teaching and for CALL researchers who aim to develop better ASR-based systems for language learning.

This study reports on the integration of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) multimedia courseware for oral presentations into a self-learning and elective program for non-English major students in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. A computer-aided instruction approach, combined with a task-based learning approach, was adopted. Computers played a central role as the means of information delivery. The courseware acted as a silent partner and played the role of a tutor and adjunct teacher to provide students with authentic materials for learning to give English oral presentations in international business and technical settings. It offered a variety of learning activities with instant on-line self-evaluation for students to practice integrative language skills and learn content knowledge. Evaluation of student performance was based upon data from pre- and post-tasks, student questionnaires about concerns, and an open-ended questionnaire. After active participation and self-learning, most of the non-English major students clearly indicated they had made some improvement or progress and felt their learning effectiveness for preparing speech texts was significantly improved. In addition, they had become more concerned about their English ability and the ESP courseware was able to meet their need for greater linguistic support to enhance their language ability.

This article reviews the literature of multimedia glosses in computer assisted language learning (CALL) and their effects on L2 vocabulary acquisition during the past seventeen years. Several studies have touched on this area to examine the potential of multimedia in a CALL environment in aiding L2 vocabulary acquisition. In this review, the researchers investigate the studies that deal with different modes of multimedia annotations in a CALL environment. This article reviews the empirical studies of multimedia glosses in reading as well as in listening comprehension activities and discusses the factors under which these studies have been conducted and their impact on L2 vocabulary acquisition. The study aims to understand how multimedia glosses have been used in the past to support second language vocabulary acquisition and also to explore any evidence regarding how multimedia glosses in a CALL environment can enhance the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. Only empirical studies (18 studies published in international refereed journals and conference) have been reviewed exclusively. The article discusses the findings of the reviewed studies and recommends future research.

Several authors (e.g., Mcniff & Whitehead, 2006; Wallace, 1998) defend the idea that teachers’ own involvement in research has the potential to encourage professional growth. Journal writing, teacher logs, written narratives and stimulated recall are some examples of methods that have been used by researchers to encourage and support teachers’ reflective practice in teacher-researcher collaborative research. This paper discusses the use of video-stimulated reflection as both a research method and as a means for teacher professional growth. The research findings are drawn from a longitudinal study that investigates a model of Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) technology professional development programme. The research was carried out in the form of seven in-depth case studies with English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in German secondary/vocational schools, as they learn how to integrate the IWB into their teaching. Research data were collected via a variety of research instruments, namely classroom observations and field notes, video recordings of school lessons and teacher training workshops, interviews and video-stimulated reflection. Findings based on the analysis of the copious amount of data gathered indicate that the video-stimulated dialogues were used by the teachers as effective opportunities for reflection, self-evaluation and pedagogical development.

This qualitative study investigates the relationship between learning opportunities and teacher cognition in the context of a videoconferencing (VC) project for foreign languages (FL) in French primary schools. Six generalist primary teachers were followed throughout the initial six-month stage of the initiative, and data were collected from learners, teachers, and trainers via questionnaire, video and audio recordings of class and feedback sessions, online teacher and trainer discussion, and video-stimulated recall interviews. Interview data revealed distinct teacher profiles involving differences in orientation to teaching and the teacher, learning and learners, and technology. These profiles corresponded to different teaching strategies and resulted in varying patterns of learner interaction in VC sessions. Teachers’ comments showed them to be guided by general rather than FL-specific pedagogical principles, and pedagogical concerns frequently intersected with technical issues as teachers learned to exploit the new VC technology. While most teachers valued spontaneous FL interaction as a key VC affordance, the filmed sessions revealed little unplanned learner-learner communication. This finding is related to teachers’ views of second language acquisition as product rather than a process; for more learner-centred teachers, spontaneity was affected by rehearsal, and for more teacher-oriented practitioners, sustained teacher intervention influenced patterns of learner participation. In addition to these classroom findings, the study highlights the value of this type of participant research in facilitating the exchange of resources and expertise, classroom video footage, and participants’ comments and queries, and thus contributing to professional development in CALL and CMC-based teacher education.

The aim of this study was to improve students’ English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing and speaking performance with appropriate learning activity design supported by Virtual Pen (VPen), a multimedia web annotation system. Students’ perceptions toward using VPen and learningactivities, attitude toward using VPen, actual VPen usage and their relationships were also investigated. After the experiment the students perceived that VPen was easy to use and useful during learning activities, and generally had a positive attitude toward using VPen. Furthermore, the students believed that learning activities were ‘playful’ and useful for improving writing and speaking performance. Further investigation revealed that the students’ actual VPen usage had a significant correlation with speaking and writing performance and that students’ speaking and writing performance significantly correlated with learning achievement. Based on our findings, we conclude that designed learning activities supported by the VPen system could facilitate students’ writing and speaking performance and therefore improve their learning achievement.

Despite the spread of reliable desktop audio and videoconferencing facilities, some CMC-based projects still rely on asynchronous written environments, if only because of the temporal constraints of synchronicity (Guichon, 2009; Develotte, Guichon & Vincent, 2010). Yet speaking is usually the skill students most need to improve when learning a second language (L2). This paper therefore sets out to measure the impact of distant written exchanges between Native Speakers (NS) and Non Native Speakers (NNS) on the development of NNS L2 oral output, focusing specifically on the effect of phonological nativisation. The context of this study is a teacher training programme for future primary school teachers in France. During their L2 course aiming to help them improve their mastery of English, they were given the opportunity to take part in a CMC-based project with PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) students from King's College, London. Action research was thus carried out to examine the potential of this project in the development of the participants’ L2 oral output.

The L2 course being task-oriented, the trainee teachers’ L2 oral output was evaluated by means of pre- and post-tests based on tasks. The results show that stability prevails over progress, which is in keeping with the fact that interlanguage development is a long process (Chapelle, 2003: 119). The results also confirm the importance of phonological nativisation when learners have access only to written authentic input.