Despite increasing attention on literacy-based approaches to foreign language instruction (e.g. Allen & Dupuy, 2013; Barrette, Paesani, & Vinall, 2010; Byrnes, 2005; Kern, 2004; Magnan, Murphy, & Sahakyan, 2014) the communicative approach's emphasis on oral proficiency continues to shadow reading practices. Although research findings…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an animated pedagogical agent on Spanish vocabulary learning. Furthermore, the study examined learners' reactions and attitudes towards the presence of the pedagogical agent in the web-based environments. A total of 47 university students enrolled in two fourth-semester Spanish classes…

Reviews the content of the courseware contained in "EXITO: Survival Spanish," noting that this course is divided into 10 chapters and contains material typically covered in a beginning Spanish course (e.g., vocabulary units including greetings, family members, time expressions, etc.). The primary strength of the EXITO program is that it is a…

Provides a description of the Nuevos Destinos CD-ROM, a joint production for students learning Spanish at the advanced-beginning, intermediate-low, or native-speaker level. Nuevos Destinos involves students in meaningful ways by asking them to solve real-world problems encountered in law offices. (Author/VWL)

Presents the latest hardware, and pedagogical and theoretical advances in computer-assisted language learning and describes an actual design implementation in a Spanish course. (Author/SED)

Describes the design and testing process that resulted in the production of "Un Meurtre a Cinet" and "Un Misterio en Toluca," two role-playing applications that ask students of French and Spanish to collaborate to solve a murder mystery using e-mail, listservs, and a culturally-rich Web site. (Author/VWL)

SPANLAP (SPANish LAnguage Processing) is a computer program which attempts to engage students of Spanish in a free-form written dialog by allowing them to ask questions. The morphological and syntactic parsing process used in SPANLAP is explained. Sample dialog illustrates limitations of the current model. (Author/LMO)

Describes an authoring language created specifically for composing computer-assisted language drills. Students can receive written or visual cues, edit their answers, and summon additional information using the Macintosh microcomputer's pull-down menus and multiple windows. (Author/SED)

Describes how beginning language learners generated electronic mail in a foreign language, Spanish, and what the resulting texts looked like. The study uncovered different, contrastive writing behaviors and a diversity of texts and suggests that communicative activities in the language classroom pose dilemmas for students. (39 references)…

Discussion of computer-based second-language learning focuses on a study of elementary school students in grades four through six who used a contextualized computer environment that was designed to provide precommunicative practice with Spanish. Highlights include student roles in small groups, cooperative learning, and the teacher's role.…

Details the current status, the future plans and the reasoning behind a five-year, campus-wide educational experiment for the integration of computers into the foreign language curriculum at MIT. The project is to use artificial intelligence in natural processing and to include interactive video and interactive audio components. (Author/SED)

Discussion of computer-assisted language learning highlights a British study with elementary, secondary and university Spanish language students that incorporated speech synthesis and interactive video. The Multifacet Language Laboratory is described, software used is explained, student and teacher reactions are discussed, and a sample of the…

This study assessed the factor structure of the LanguEdge™ test and the invariance of its factors across language groups. Confirmatory factor analyses of individual tasks and subsets of items in the four sections of the test, Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing, was carried out for Arabic-, Chinese-, and Spanish-speaking test takers. Two…