As this issue of ReCALL is about to go to press, the preparations for the EUROCALL 2011 Conference, to be held in Nottingham, 31 Aug–3 Sep 2011, are well under way. It is intended that selected papers from the conference will be published in the January 2013 issue of ReCALL (the deadline for submitting full articles is 31 December 2011), as in recent years it has proved difficult to get papers from the EUROCALL conference ready in time for publication in May. This is particularly the case in this issue. Selected papers from EUROCALL conferences do not constitute “proceedings”, which aim at providing a concise, yet comprehensive, account of what actually happened at the conference. In her January editorial, June Thompson outlined the lengthy publication process, from the initial submission of a paper to its actual publication. Selected papers from EUROCALL conferences are subjected to the same rigorous reviewing and editing process. Depending on the amount of revisions that have been requested by reviewers and editors alike, getting a conference paper to the required standard may take time.
Although it was not planned this way, the first two articles of this issue, which are both extended versions of papers presented at the EUROCALL 2010 Conference in Bordeaux, focus on the development of listening comprehension among French university learners of an L2. Both studies provide valuable insights into the potential role of multimedia CALL in enabling students to enhance their comprehension of the spoken language. In the first article, Laurence Vincent-Durroux and colleagues investigate the impact on the development of oral language awareness in ESL of training in those areas of morpho-syntax and phonology that are most likely to create difficulties for French learners in their attempt to decipher spoken English, as well as in the use of IPAFootnote 1 transcriptions. In the second article, Stéphanie Roussel tracks, with the help of screen recording software, and examines in-depth the use of listening strategies displayed by French learners of German listening to podcasts on a computer.
In the regular papers section, Shu-Chiao Tsai's article looks at the effectiveness of multimedia courseware designed to help EFL students develop their oral presentation skills. The integration of computer assisted self-directed learning into a task-based language curriculum is shown to enhance students’ language learning and presentation skills. Mohammed Ali Mohsen and M. Balakumar's paper offers a comprehensive analysis of published empirical studies that investigate the effect of multimedia glosses on L2 vocabulary acquisition.
