The article reviews existing research on cyber-bullying, framed through a policy lens. It is clear that public policy issues for cyber-bullying involve tensions between the values of freedom of speech, the best interests of the child, and parental and school protective authority over the child. Given the complexity of the problem, as well as…

This paper describes an English language listening test intended as computer-based testing material for secondary school students in Hong Kong, where considerable attention is being invested in online and computer-based testing. As well as providing a school-based testing facility, the study aims to contribute to the knowledge base regarding the…

The transition from paper-based to computer-based assessment raises a number of important issues about how mode might affect children's performance and question answering strategies. In this project 104 eleven-year-olds were given two sets of matched mathematics questions, one set on-line and the other on paper. Facility values were analyzed to…

This exploratory investigation examined the relationship between childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and related psychosocial characteristics and sexual behaviors among 46 gay/bisexual male escorts who advertise via the Internet. More than a quarter of men (28.3%) reported some history of CSA. Men reporting CSA were more likely to be from an ethnic…

The purpose of this study was to investigate ESL instructors' feedback techniques and the rationales behind these techniques, to explore ESL students' beliefs about the relative effectiveness of various types of feedback, and to compare students' beliefs with those of their instructors. A university-level ESL instructor and two of her students…

This article examines social presence in virtual asynchronous learning communities among foreign language teachers. We present the findings of two studies investigating cross-institutional asynchronous forums created to engage participants in online dialogues regarding their foreign language teacher preparation experiences in and out of the…

Purpose: This paper reports on the development of a workplace-based e-learning programme for small and medium enterprise (SME) managers in five European countries. The course is designed to address the specific needs of SME managers who, it has been noted, represent a significant proportion of the EU workforce but often experience difficulty in…

CALL evaluation might ideally draw on principles from fields such as second language acquisition, language pedagogy, instructional design, and testing and measurement in order to make judgments about criteria such as elaborated input, feedback, collaborative learning, authentic tasks, navigation, screen design, reliability, validity, impact, and…

The increasing use of technology to meet the vast educational needs of our expanding world has led to heightened concerns about learning experiences within educational environments that are removed from the immediate purview of instructors (Duffy & Kirkley, 2004). Recent calls for use of more collaborative environments in which students interact…

This paper reports on a telecollaborative exchange between university language learners in Spain and the USA and analyses the effects of the different institutional and sociocultural contexts on its development. While the socioinstitutional dimension of German-American exchanges has already benefited from extensive study in the literature, this…

Concentrating on the unintentionally dominant group, the author considers how Walter Ong demonstrates that novice writers have a narrow concept of audience that is really a narcissistic fiction projected as an ideal reader (1975). Given this, writing instructors can work to broaden their students' sense of audience to consider readers who are not…

This qualitative case study examined web-based portfolio development in the service of supporting reflective thinking and learning within the innovative context of Professional Development Schools. Specifically, this study investigated the nature of the evidence-based philosophies developed by prospective teachers as the central part of the…

This study aimed to comprehensively investigate the impact of a word-processor on an ESL writing assessment, covering comparison of inter-rater reliability, the quality of written products, the writing process across different testing occasions using different writing media, and students' perception of a computer-delivered test. Writing samples of…

The University of Virginia's (UVA) Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese created two new hybrid courses for elementary Spanish which supplement 3 hours a week of class time with 2 hours of mandatory, web-based practice activities to respond to a need to make better use of personnel resources at the university. This article reports on the…

Distance learning is a growing trend. There were an estimated 3,077,000 enrollments in all distance education courses offered by two- and four-year institutions in 2000-2001. A survey by the National Center for Educational Statistics revealed that in 2000-2001, 56 percent of two- and four-year degree-granting institutions offered some type of…