The topic of EUROCALL '97, ‘Where research and practice meet’, is perhaps the most provocative and complex one in all of higher education. It would be interesting to recast the assertion that EUROCALL '97 is where research and practice meet as a more probing question: Where do research and practice meet? Unarguably, yes, at this conference: our program – the variety of presentations on practice, and on the research done on practice, and on theoretical research and the nature of research – makes that clear. But it is not only at this yearly gathering; research and practice also meet in the organization of EUROCALL, and for many of us in our daily professional lives. But we could push the question further and ask: do research and practice meet regularly and inherently in the profession of CALL? In the multimedia classroom or language center? In our materials? In cyberspace? in the mind of the learner? To most of those questions we would probably have to give, reluctantly, a negative answer.

This paper reports on the experimental use of a broadband computer network hypermedia environment for language learning (French, English and Spanish). Using Web-based resources, students engage in a collaborative task over a network which offers high quality video-conferencing, application sharing and access to authentic multimedia resources. One of the main aims was to establish the practicalities of providing learners of languages with opportunities to engage in reciprocal peer tutoring. After outlining the pedagogical assumptions, and describing the set-up of the network-based learning environment, the trials are analysed, and the effectiveness of network-based language learning in supporting collaborative learning is discussed.

This paper examines the range of different factors which in our experience contribute to student resistance to the use of computers for language learning. These problems relate to aspects of the computing environment, social and psychological factors and issues relating to the curriculum and teaching methods. We have made basic suggestions about ways of overcoming these resistances. However our principal finding is that the most effective and coherent way of fostering student adoption of CALL is to develop a computer based learning environment, which draws on the success of communications software and the Internet, based on the computer conferencing program First Class.

When Susan presented this paper at EUROCALL 97 she was extremely ill. As Susan's PhD supervisor, I knew only too well what she was going through when she mounted the rostrum and nervously organised her notes, but I could not have imagined that in two short months her life would come to an end. Such was Susan's courage in her struggle against cancer that she gave few outward indications of her suffering and only looked to the future, continuing to teach, to research and to give her attention to her home and family.

My last conversation with Susan centred on this paper and the trials she was about to conduct with her students in the new academic year. The paper is published here with the minimum of editing. It stands as a tribute to Susan's research but represents only a short summary of the vast amount of data that she had collected so meticulously, and it only hints at the interesting findings that were beginning to emerge. It is likely, however, that the mass of notes that Susan has left behind will yield further results.

Susan is greatly missed by her colleagues and students at Middlesex University and by all her friends and family.

The paper describes how networked self-access EAP materials have been developed at Warwick University since 1992. The current package of materials (The CELTE Self-Access Centre) can be freely accessed from the World Wide Web, and aims to provide some basic training in Information Technology alongside more conventional language and study skills activities. Problems of development and distribution are discussed, including the resistance of those EAP practitioners who have little experience of the Internet in an educational context, and the unwillingness of users to interact with unknown task setters.

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.

To respond to students' need for more speaking practice, the Open University's Centre for Modern Languages is currently investigating the benefits of using an Internet-based, real-time audio application in distance learning/teaching. During a four-month trial period, French and German students met at weekly intervals to use the target language and participated in role-plays or other pre-arranged learning tasks requiring collaborative interaction. This paper describes the FLUENT (Framework for Language Use in Environments Embedded in New Technology) project from the tutors' point of view, focusing on how learner autonomy and the tutor role were affected by the new learning environment.

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.