In spite of the increasing availability of highquality CALL material, it is a fact upported by Laurillard et al.'s (1993) survey of academics' use of courseware materials that many lecturers in higher education are more often put off rather than attracted by the completeness of the material available. They would prefer to have more control over both the orm and content of the CALL material they intro-duce into their own courses, courses hich are usually of their own design, sometimes based on research interests and which ave evolved from several years' refinement and fine tuning. The recent appearance of pecialised authoring templates such as The Poetry Shell (Timbrell 1994), designed for tudying poems of up to 20,000 characters in length, and several authorable products from he TELL Consortium including an authoring shell for the translation package Translt-TIGER (Thompson et al 1997), seems to indicate a continuing, if not expanding role for institution-based CAL development.

This article will demonstrate the methodology behind the way in which two quite different tools were used to complement each other. By using a variety of authentic source materials, and carefully integrating this material into a second year French course, the authors believe they have provided a rich source of material which other universities might well be able to exploit. The article will explain the advantages and disadvantages of some aspects of each of the tools, talk about the difficulty of overcoming common problems such as giving good feedback, adequately exploiting authentic material, and finish by presenting the results of their work on evaluating this material with students. Based on a case study in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Dundee, the article looks at the problems involved in producing CALL material using two separate authoring packages. It explores the exploitation of authentic material in a multimedia environment, looks at the advantages and disadvantages of the tools used by providing a comparative evaluation, and discusses the complex problems faced by teachers in developing CALL and integrating it into their courses.

This paper deals more with what is sent down the pipe than with the pipe itself. In other words our concern is more with the pedagogical quality of software than with hardware or structures. It simply aims at presenting several attempts to resolve problems of understanding and speaking English met by French students. In every one of these attempts we have resorted to information technology. More particularly we have used authoring toolkits in order to ‘feed’ computers with our teaching methods adapted to the students′ needs. We have fried to keep a critical eye on our practice, which has enabled us to find answers with a limited scope even though we hope they might be of interest as a starting point for new reflections. The software we have developed represents those answers.

The article provides a description of the ReLaTe (remote language teaching) project, to develop a working demonstrator using a multicast-based conferencing system (Mbone service), for distance foreign language tuition. It covers aspects of technical development for applications over SuperJANET and gives an overview of the trials and evaluation, including how students and teachers adjusted to the system; the advantages and drawbacks of the system; how the system affected learning and teaching in the context of acquisition and delivery of foreign languages. The ReLaTe project is a joint research project between the University of Exeter and University College London, involving the Foreign Language Centre and IT Services (Pallas) at Exeter and the Language Centre and the Department of Computer Science at UCL. The project began in September 1994, with funding from BT and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) of the Higher Education Council of the UK. mis article covers the work of the project from September 1994 until December 1995.

The role of the conceptual dictionary in CALL to enable both active learning and passive referencing is becoming well-established. The motivation for this work comes from the analysis of an existing conceptual dictionary that, whilst exhibiting many strengths, proved difficult to extend with multimedia capabilities. The focus of this paper is the design and development of a conceptual dictionary, incorporating a multimedia framework, by making use of established techniques from software engineering and computer science. The analysis, data design and interface design for the new system are discussed. A prototype system has been developed using Delphi and Paradox running on Windows 95.

This program is designed for improving student learning skills both in class and in independent learning mode in a number of areas: textual analysis, résumé work and vocabulary extension. It is not a concordance program, although it has some elements of a concordance, but seeks to provide a computerenhanced working environment for the pedagogy of textual study for advanced language learners. Unlike other text-based programs, which mainly deal with text enhancement, concordancing and the provision of exhaustive linguistic analysis of stylistic features, TAP (Text Analysis) is concerned to provide students with a pathway that will enable them to generate their own analysis of any text studied within the program.

Summer 1998 was certainly an important one for those of us interested in the use of Teaching and Language Corpora. The third TALC conference was held at Keble College, Oxford, under the more than able auspices of Lou Burnard. Lou had carefully prepared a program of talks which challenged the TALC community, and moved on the TALC debate further.