The flexible use of digital recordings from EFL classrooms as well as online communication with teaching experts are two promising ways of implementing e-learning in the context of initial teacher training. Our research focuses on how to blend these elements efficiently with the different theoretical and practical content layers of an introductory course “Teaching English as a Foreign Language” to foster the development of critical, reflective thinking of prospective teachers of English and to empower the learners. In this paper we discuss the concept of autonomy as a course strategy and argue that enabling a student to take responsibility and to make informed choices is the main route to an autonomous learner. We introduce and analyze learning activities such as working with multimedia-based case stories that include video episodes as situational anchors and conducting an einterview. These learning activities are two formats that integrate elearning and contact learning in a directed, interactive way to foster the learner’s autonomy. The study is a follow-up of a pilot study on blended learning in a teacher training course and was conducted as action research in the 2004/05 winter semester. It combines qualitative and quantitative research methods and integrates multiple perspectives on the teaching and learning scenarios.

This paper describes the integration of hypermedia adaptive systems for foreign language learners at an early age Our research project is concerned with exploring the relationship between language learning and information technology according to six different phases: a preliminary study of the plausible adaptive system; the development of lessons based on hypermedia and learners’ needs; the examination of language learners’ profiles; the definition of an adapted interface; the integration of the systems in schools; and the evaluation of the use of such systems. While the last three stages are still under way, we have already obtained some significant feedback from preliminary observation and approaches, which chiefly reveal the importance of accounting for interrelated factors at an early age, such as specific learning strategies, skills, and graphical design.

While language teacher education programmes and language syllabi in secondary education encourage the use of the target language in the classroom, resources to support teachers in this endeavour, such as books with useful phrases, do not state that the examples they provide are corpus-based, i.e. drawn from actual language use rather than invented phrases. This paper investigates whether consultation of a corpus of classroom discourse can be of benefit in language teacher education. The paper describes a project involving the creation of corpora of classroom discourse in French and Spanish, and the use of these corpora with student teachers. After setting the research in the context of corpora and classroom interaction, it examines issues such as the content of the corpora, the type of consultation (direct or mediated by the teacher), and the student teachers’ evaluation of the activity. Special attention is paid to one particular aspect of classroom interaction, discourse markers.

The aim of this research is to reveal the dynamics of focus on form in task completion via videoconferencing. This examination draws on current second language learning theories regarding effective language acquisition, research in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and empirical data from an evaluation of desktop videoconferencing-supported task completion by distance learners of Chinese. Occasions of focus on form that occurred in this learning environment are explored using the Varonis and Gassmodel (1985) for negotiation of meaning. Initial findings indicate that videoconferencing-supported negotiation of meaning may facilitate second language acquisition at a distance and has its own distinct features. Issues for future research in the employment of videoconferencing for L2 learning at a distance are suggested.

This article discusses a framework for the development of tasks in a synchronous online environment used for language learning and teaching. It shows how a theoretical approach based on second language acquisition (SLA) principles, sociocultural and constructivist theories, and concepts taken from research on multimodality and new literacies, can influence the design and implementation of tasks for computer-mediated communication (CMC). The findings are based on a study conducted at the Open University, a study which examined all three levels of theory, design and implementation. The paper first presents the underlying theories in more detail before examining how these theories are translated into the design of tasks for language tutorials via an audio-graphic conferencing tool. Finally it looks at how the design was implemented in practice by focusing on a number of issues such as student–student and student–tutor interaction, feedback, use of multimodal tools, and the differences between teaching face-to-face and online.

During the last decade, most research studies have analysed online synchronous interactions in written mode (textchat), highlighting the benefits of chatting for the development of learners’ oral proficiency. The environment used in our experiment is multimodal and based on a synchronous audio conference. Analyzing interactions in such an environment is rather new in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). This study is related to false-beginners in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course, presenting a high degree of heterogeneity in their proficiency levels. We use two approaches. One is quantitative and involves learners’ participation in audio and textchat. The other is qualitative and relates to the complexity of professional discourse. Firstly, we provide a method that accurately measures oral participation in the two modes. Then, within this framework, we report that heterogeneous linguistic levels do not constrain learners’ oral participation, outlining the equalizing role played in this instance by the textchat. Moreover, this type of environment supports oral production by false-beginners who have over a period of years become unaccustomed to learning and speaking in a foreign language, and leads them to regain self-confidence. The qualitative part of our study shows that false-beginners can cope with professional conversations at different levels of complexity.

We felt honoured to have met our friends and colleagues from all around the world in Krakow at the EUROCALL 2005 Conference. The organisers aimed to focus attention on the changing concepts and practices concerning autonomy in learning and teaching brought about by technological developments. This year's programme promised to actively promote the awareness, availability and practical benefits of autonomous learning using CALL, WELL & TELL at all levels of education, with a view to enhancing educational effectiveness, as measured by student success, both academically and personally. The organisers hoped to bring a rich and interesting variety of perspectives to the conference via a very complex programme.

By providing access, data and new forms of literacy and communication practices, it is widely accepted that networked technologies have done much to promote learner autonomy. However, in practical terms, the lack of resources, expertise and research investigations into learner interaction have all too often meant that autonomous learning is conveniently likened to teacher-independent learning, largely relying on the success and assumed intuitiveness of the World Wide Web (web) for its learner driven delivery. This situation affecting foreign language teaching and learning has been further aggravated by the recent trend, at least in UK universities, to conceive languages solely as communicative tools, further severing them from their academic base and cultural roots, often reducing learner autonomy to poor repetitive interaction. On this premise, this paper proposes to focus on how to make better use of the interactive potential of the web in order to maximise independent language learning online. From a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design perspective, it intends to shed further light on and increase our understanding of hypermedia and multimedia structures through learner participation and evaluation. On the basis of evidence from an ongoing research investigation into online CALL literacy, it will seek to identify crucial causalities between the user interface and learner interaction affecting the learners’ focus and engagement within their own learning processes. The adopted methodology combines a task analysis of a hypermedia prototype underpinned by an activity theory approach and participatory design based on user walkthroughs and focus groups. By looking at the relationship between action and goal as well as between activities and motives, it attempts to provide a framework for evaluating online hypermedia interactivity based on identified activities, design tasks and design criteria.

This paper surveys what we have learned during the last ten years about the lattice $\lambda \mathcal{T}$ of all $\lambda$-theories (= equational extensions of untyped $\lambda$-calculus), via the sets $\lambda \mathcal{C}$ consisting of the $\lambda$-theories that are representable in a uniform class $\mathcal{C}$ of $\lambda$-models. This includes positive answers to several questions raised in Berline (2000), as well as several independent results, the state of the art on the long-standing open questions concerning the representability of $\lambda _{\beta},\lambda _{\beta\eta}$, $H$ as theories of models, and 22 open problems.

We will focus on the class $\mathcal{G}$ of graph models, since almost all the existing semantic proofs on $\lambda \mathcal{T}$ have been, or could be, more easily, obtained via graph models, or slight variations of them. But in this paper we will also give some evidence that, for all uniform classes $\mathcal{C},\mathcal{C}^{\prime}$ of proper $\lambda$-models living in functional semantics, $\lambda \mathcal{C}-\lambda \mathcal{C}^{\prime}$ should have cardinality $2^{\omega }$, provided $ \mathcal{C}$ is not included in $\mathcal{C}^{\prime}.$

A useful separation lemma for partial cm-lattices is proved equivalent to PIT, the Prime Ideal Theorem. The relation of various versions of the Lemma to each other and to PIT is also explored.

We propose compactly generated monotone convergence spaces as a well-behaved topological generalisation of directed-complete partial orders (dcpos). The category of such spaces enjoys the usual properties of categories of ‘predomains’ in denotational semantics. Moreover, such properties are retained if one restricts to spaces with a countable pseudobase in the sense of E. Michael, a fact that permits connections to be made with computability theory, realizability semantics and recent work on the closure properties of topological quotients of countably based spaces (qcb spaces). We compare the standard domain-theoretic constructions of products and function spaces on dcpos with their compactly generated counterparts, showing that these agree in important cases, though not in general.

We show that the extensional ordering of the sequential functionals of pure type 3, for example, as defined via game semantics (Abramsky et al. 1994; Hyland and Ong 2000), is not cpo-enriched. This shows that this model does not equal Milner's (Milner 1977) fully abstract model for PCF.

In late August 2004, some 60 mathematicians and computer scientists gathered in Darmstadt for the seventh Workshop Domains, to mark the 65th birthday of Professor Klaus Keimel and his retirement from his position at the Technical University Darmstadt. The papers in this volume were selected from submissions that were received in response to a call issued to participants during the meeting, and to a wider community afterwards.

In this note we show that quotients of countably based spaces (qcb spaces) and topological predomains, as introduced by M. Schröder and A. Simpson, are not closed under sobrification. As a consequence, replete topological predomains need not be sober, that is, in general, repletion is not given by sobrification. Our counterexample also shows that a certain tentative ‘equaliser construction’ of repletion fails for qcb spaces.

Our results also extend to the more general class of core compactly generated spaces.

In this paper, we describe three distinct monoids over domains, each with a commutative analog, which define bag domain monoids. Our results were inspired by work by Varacca (Varacca 2003), and they lead to a constructive approach to his Hoare indexed valuations over a continuous poset $P$. We use our constructive approach to describe an analog of the probabilistic power domain, and the laws that characterise it, that forms a Scott-closed subset of Varacca's construct. We call these the Hoare random variables over$P$.

We present a Cartesian closed category ELOC of equilocales, which contains the category LOC of locales as a reflective full subcategory. The embedding of LOC into ELOC preserves products and all exponentials of exponentiable locales.

We give a domain-theoretic analogue of the classical Banach–Alaoglu theorem, showing that the patch topology on the weak$*$ topology is compact. Various theorems follow concerning the stable compactness of spaces of valuations on a topological space. We conclude with reformulations of the patch topology in terms of polar sets or Minkowski functionals, showing, in particular, that the ‘sandwich set’ of linear functionals is compact.