This paper will describe pedagogical approaches for re-purposing an open educational resource (OER) designed and produced by the Deutsche Welle. This free online program, "Deutsch Interaktiv," consists of authentic digital videos, slideshows and audio texts and gives a contemporary overview of the culture and language in Germany, Austria…

Over recent years, educational institutions have been making increasing use of virtual environments to set up collaborative activities for learners. While it is recognized that teachers play an important role in facilitating learner collaboration online, they may not have the necessary skills to do so successfully. Thus, a small-scale professional…

This article builds on a previous article published in 2007, which aimed at clarifying the concept of tutoring. Based on a new epistemological stance (emergentism) the authors will here show how the various components of the computer-assisted language learning situation form a complex chaotic system. They advocate that modelling is a way of…

Pronunciation errors may be caused by several different deviations from the target, such as voicing, intonation, insertions or deletions of segments, or that the articulators are placed incorrectly. Computer-animated pronunciation teachers could potentially provide important assistance on correcting all these types of deviations, but they have an…

Various language learning projects using "Second Life" (SL) have been documented; still, their specific learning potentials, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) context, remain to be explored. The current study aims to add one piece of empirical evidence on how SL can be infused into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL)…

This article proposes an instructional design model for blended learning writing courses for English language learners (ELLs). It will do so by combining the main points of the cognitive load, activity, sociocultural, and transactional distance theories to present four tenets essential for optimal learning for ELLs: structure, environment,…

This article describes a series of exploratory L1 to L2 dubbing projects for which students translated and used editing software to dub short American film and TV clips into their target language. Translating and dubbing into the target language involve students in multifaceted, high-level language production tasks that lead to enhanced vocabulary…

This article describes the development and evaluation of a computer-assisted language learning approach which integrates a finite state dialogue engine with an animated pedagogical agent. The design of the request game is theoretically motivated by interlanguage pragmatics and Long's Interaction Hypothesis. The tutoring system creates a venue in…

Data-driven learning (DDL), or corpus-based language learning, involves the learner in an exploratory task to discover appropriate expressions or collocates regarding his writing. However, the problematic units of meaning in each learner's writing are so diverse that conventional corpora often prove futile. The search engine Google with the…

Extensive knowledge of collocations is a key factor that distinguishes learners from fluent native speakers. Such knowledge is difficult to acquire simply because there is so much of it. This paper describes a system that exploits the facilities offered by digital libraries to provide a rich collocation-learning environment. The design is based on…

The web is a potentially useful corpus for language study because it provides examples of language that are contextualized and authentic, and is large and easily searchable. However, web contents are heterogeneous in the extreme, uncontrolled and hence "dirty," and exhibit features different from the written and spoken texts in other linguistic…

Previous work in the literature reveals that EFL learners were deficient in collocations that are a hallmark of near native fluency in learner's writing. Among different types of collocations, the verb-noun (V-N) one was found to be particularly difficult to master, and learners' first language was also found to heavily influence their collocation…

This paper briefly discusses different research approaches in CALL and makes a case for applying grounded theory (GT) to data gathered from an electronic role-play conducted in L2. The article shows that this method can help gain a better understanding of what learners do when engaged in the task. Through the process of open coding, four…

Most existing web-based language learning exercises may be termed "static" in that their content is fixed; the sentences exist in the form in which the developer wrote them, and the scope of the exercise and the variety of interactions can only be expanded by manually adding to the existing stock. One solution to this problem is an application…

The choice of grammatical framework in ICALL--the branch of CALL that applies artificial intelligence techniques--has important implications for both research and development. Matthews (1993) argued for one "that potentially meshes with SLA (second language acquisition)" (p. 5) and sketches three criteria that facilitate the crucial decision of…