This exploratory study focuses on international students' usage of digital tools in order to understand what role such tools play in the transition to their new academic environments and what learning opportunities they provide. Not only do digital tools accompany international students' social, cultural, and linguistic transitions as they move to…

The present investigation analyses the potential of a pedagogical dynamic assessment (DA) approach to foster second language (L2) development through the use of a mobile instant messaging application. Students' zone of actual and proximal development is observed through the use of a grammar and vocabulary level test and the use of the WhatsApp…

Compared to traditional pen-and-paper presentation of information, computer-assisted argument mapping seems to be more efficient in developing lower order thinking skills such as memory and comprehension. The present study investigated the impact of argument map construction and reading via computer versus pen and paper on English as a foreign…

Lexis-based views of second or foreign language (L2) teaching place prime importance on the teaching of conventionalized multi-word lexical items, or unanalyzed chunks, as a useful mechanism for fostering learners' creative production of forms and their subsequent development of L2 competence. This pretest/posttest quasiexperimental study probed…

The paper describes a teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language education offered to graduate students at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. It also presents the results of two questionnaires distributed to the students prior to and after the second edition of the course. The main aims of the course are: to…

This paper details the development of a multidialectical text-to-speech (TTS) application, "Sinteiseoir," for the Irish language. This work is being carried out in the context of Irish as a lesser-used language, where learners and other L2 speakers have limited direct exposure to L1 speakers and speech communities, and where native sound…

Although "annotation" is a widely-researched topic in Corpus Linguistics (CL), its potential role in Data Driven Learning (DDL) has not been addressed in depth by Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) practitioners. Furthermore, most of the research in the use of DDL methods pays little attention to annotation in the design and implementation…

In order to make optimal educational use of social spaces offered by thousands of international communities in the second generation web applications termed Web 2 or Social Web, ICT competences as well as social skills are needed for both teachers and learners. The paper outlines differences in competence structures of Net Natives (who came of age…

This paper deals with the implementation of an "online pedagogical assistant" in a blended learning device for English for Special Purposes (ESP) students in a French university (UPMC, Paris VI). As it is now, it comprises a customized website designed to serve as a guide through the development of the students' work. The architecture of…

This paper describes a study of the computer essay-scoring program BETSY. While the use of computers in rating written scripts has been criticised in some quarters for lacking transparency or lack of fit with how human raters rate written scripts, a number of essay rating programs are available commercially, many of which claim to offer comparable…

One of the issues that has been debated in the context of fairly open learning partnerships such as tandem learning has been whether and, if so, how much pedagogical support should be provided. Another issue is how do language learners who have grown accustomed to maximising their learning through comprehensible input and output make the…

In the rapidly changing environment of language learning and teaching, electronic literacies have an increasingly important role to play. While much research on new literacies focuses on the World Wide Web, the aim in this study is to investigate the importance of corpus consultation as a new type of literacy which is of particular relevance in…

There are now many CALL authoring packages that can create interactive websites and a large number of language teachers are writing materials for the whole range of such packages. Currently, each product stores its data in different formats thus hindering interoperability, pooling of digital resources and moving between software packages based in…

This paper discusses a framework for designing online tasks that capitalizes on the possibilities that the Internet and the Web offer for language learning. To present such a framework, we draw from constructivist theories (Brooks and Brooks, 1993) and their application to educational technology (Newby, Stepich, Lehman and Russell, 1996; Jonassen,…