Electronic literacy today is a moving target. How and why people read and write online are evolving at the fast pace of Internet time. One of the most striking developments in the past few years has been how new social networking phenomena on the Web like community tagging, shared bookmarking, and blogs have created convergences between consumers…

Foreign Language Learning (FLL) students commonly have few opportunities to use their target language. Teachers in FLL situations do their best to create opportunities during classes through pair or group work, but a variety of factors ranging from a lack of time to shyness or limited opportunity for quality feedback hamper this. This paper…

This study explored the effect of two enhancement techniques on L2 learners' look-up behaviour during a reading task and word retention afterwards amongst Flemish learners of German: a Vocabulary Test Announcement and Task-induced Word Relevance. Eighty-four participants were recruited for this study. They were randomly assigned to one of two…

Discusses two recent innovations made available via the Internet that are useful to language educators: blogs and wikis. Blogs are on-line journals that offer opportunities for collaborative use. They are easily linked and cross-linked, thus creating larger on-line communities. Wikis feature a loosely structured set of pages, linked in multiple…

Describes what a Web-based language test (WBT) is, how WBTs differ from traditional computer-based tests, and what uses WBTs have in language testing. After a brief review of computer-based testing, WBTs are defined and categorized as low-tech or high tech. Advantages and design and implementation issues of WBTs are considered before examining the…

Uses the concept of "emergent texture" to analyze the corpus behavior of the four nominal demonstratives--"this,""that,""these," an "those"--in an interlanguage corpus created at Yonsei University in Korea in 1999. Investigates a corpus of 109 single paragraphs. The concept of markedness is…

Blogging has emerged as one of the most popular forms of online discourse. The ease and lack of expense in setting up blogs has raised intriguing possibilities for language learning classrooms. The unique nature of their architecture and their low cost have not only affected how students can publish and distribute their work to a wider audience…

Focuses on tools and technologies that are likely to be important to language teachers entering the classroom for the first time. (Author/VWL)

Describes the "Agora Language Marketplace," a unique resource for Internet users with foreign-language interests. (Author/VWL)

Investigates discourse functions and syntactic complexity in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learner output obtained via two different modes of computer-mediated communication (CMC): asynchronous and synchronous discussions. Two instructors and twenty-five students from two advanced ESL writing classes participated in this study. (Author/VWL)

Provides a description of the following speech technologies for language learning: recorded speech (from analog to digital); speech recognition; speech synthesis; multilingual speech to speech; speech on the Web. A resource list is also provided. (Author/VWL)

Defines 10 methodological principles for task-based language learning and illustrates their implementation in the case of foreign language distance learning for less commonly taught languages. (Author/VWL)

Provides information on foreign language study and the brain and highlights a Web site called Foreign Language Study and the Brain. The Web site is in Spanish and English and provides information on brain-sensitive activities that foster memory storage and language retrieval. Recent research on the brain and general recommendations for classroom…

Presents the necessary steps for designing an effective language learning tool to foster communication and negotiation, considering the importance of supporting integral education, using tasks, providing elaborated input and feedback, and promoting collaborative learning. Reports on a study conducted using such a tool to determine whether…

Commentary on an article presented in a previous issue of this journal titled "'To Gloss or Not to Gloss': An Investigation of Reading Comprehension Online." The commentary is supportive of the conclusions drawn in the original article and offers arguments to spur serious research on the topic of glossing in the future. (Author/VWL)