The teaching of the Chinese language in Sweden, and indeed the whole of Scandinavia, has always suffered from an absence of suitable teaching materials. Hitherto, there has not existed any teaching course specifically adapted to the needs of Swedish students, with the result that teachers have been forced to use English-language courses produced in the United States or England, or text-books printed in Mainland China or Taiwan

Videoconferencing has been proposed as a technology which has an immediate and beneficial application to language learning, because it enables face-to-face communication at a distance. The costs remain high, however, and course providers need to be sure what additional ‘pedagogical overheads’ are involved, i.e. in the rethinking of teaching approaches and the preparation of material. This paper reports on a study of a videoconference tutorial carried out as part of the distance learning component of a course in Professional English. The study shows that the interaction between teacher, subject expert and students was characterised by the absence, as well as the presence, of important features of face-to-face communication, and that certain kinds of tutorial activity, such as individual correction, and the management of group discussion, were not especially well supported by the technology used. We discuss the implications of this for the pedagogy of language teaching by videoconference, and draw some lessons for the incorporation of the technology into the mainstream of distance language learning.

This paper reports on a pilot project which examined the effects on essay writing skills in advanced German of computer-based teaching which allowed a co-operative approach to writing and the pmvision of immediate teacher and peer feedback through the interactive display and networking of student work.

Third year German students were assigned to computer-based or conventional teaching groups taught by two different teachers using common materials and the same task-based approach. Prior to implementation of the project and again at the end, students were given a standard writing task to allow the level of their writing skills to be evaluated structurally and linguistically. The major focus was on the development of arguments, together with appropriate intmductions and conclusions. Grammar and expression were also measured to check whether the absence of an explicit focus on grammar had a detrimental effect on accuracy.

The students in these two groups along with all other third year German students completed a questionnaire that elicited information about their abilities and interest in German and their attitude to the use of computers. Teacher evaluation and qualitative data were obtained from participating students at the end of the project. Results indicated that the experimental students achieved significantly higher ratings for the logical linking of ideas in the body of their essays and were positive about the technology.

It is not bold to predict that in many countries it will soon be no morepossible for education systems to be computer-free than it already is for transport systems to be motor-vehicle-free. The technology simply has too much to offer in too many areas for people to ignore it or to be content todo without it. It is therefore in the interest of any community of learnersand teachers that very careful thought be given to the integration of computers into the education process if they are to avoid situations in the classroom that are informatic equivalents of traffic jams, exhaust pollution, lunatic drivers, and road fatalities. On the road, mayhem and casualties are minimised by such things as road rules, town planning, speed limits, vehicle inspection, sign-posting, traffic lights, speed cameras and random breath testing.

Formes Cachées is a visuo-spatial puzzle in the form of a computer game. Users participate in the game by means of a natural language interface through which they ask questions and give instructions. Solving the puzzle therefore involves using language in a purposeful way as a tool rather than as subject matter. This article describes a French version of the game. In its current form the game would be mainly of novelty value in foreign language teaching, but its techniques could be used in creating software to cover a more extensive range of language.

The software, which runs under Microsoft Windows in 800 x 600 SVGA, may be downloaded from the CT1 Modern Languages World Wide Web server, http://www.hull.ac.uk/cti/software.htm

Final-year translation teaching in the Italian department at the University of Hull involves modules using a computer-based methodology from Italian into English. These modules are taught using Translt-TIGER and TransLit-TIGER, in the forms in which they are commercially available. The aim of our courses is to use technology in order to enhance the quality of training in translation. The modules are conceived of as a move beyond traditional practice towards a type of teaching model which may be more relevant to best practices in the translation profession. Indeed it may well hasten more students beyond the noise of interlanguage to the quiddities of idiom.

Manning argued that exploratory teaching is well suited to learning with computers, as it increases the learners' autonomy and motivation. The main thrust of this paper is to evaluate the merits of exploratory teaching of grammatical rules as opposed to the more traditional explicit or implicit approaches. It provides a brief description of tests carried out on a group of learners of French in the UK, working on gender agreement rules, using a specifically designed CALL program and presents and analyses the results of the testing, which favour the Exploratory approach.

Mindful of how much time is needed to produce satisfactory texts for standard CALL authoring packages, it is surprising that an abundant source of free, first-class, totally authentic and up-to-date raw material still remains largely untapped for supplementing course material and for self-access language learning.