jkrajka@batory.plo.lublin.pl

Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics was a one-day workshop organised as a part of a large international conference 33^rd Poznań Linguistic Meeting, held in Bukowy Dworek from 27-29 April, 2001, and organised by the School of English of Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań. The conference was attended by almost one hundred participants, including guests from Austria, Norway, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as scholars from most Polish universities, both public and private. The three-day conference had almost fifty presentations in three concurrent sessions, divided into such workshops as "Challenges for Natural Linguistics," "Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics," "Socio-historical Studies of Language," "Phonetics-Phonology Interface: Palatalization" and "Language and Global Communication." The venue of the conference, Bukowy Dworek, was a luxurious hotel and a conference centre, situated half way from Poznań to Berlin among beautiful forests and lakes. The hotel provided excellent conference facilities to make the conference a fully successful event.

Because of my professional interest, I attended "Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics" workshop, which took place on the first day, Friday. It consisted of 14 presentations and concluded with a panel discussion of participants on some of the themes recurrent in the presentations. In general, the workshop contents touched upon the following areas: teachers' attitudes to ICT, training teachers in ICT, using computer software (electronic dictionaries, speech analysis programmes), teacher and student models, distance learning, corpus studies.

The whole conference started with a plenary by Dafydd Gibbon, who talked about the documentation of endangered languages, explaining in detail how data are gathered and processed with the help of computer software for analysing pronunciation.

Then, the conference divided into three sessions, and CCAAL followed with a presentation of Tadeusz Piotrowski on electronic dictionaries. Piotrowski, dissatisfied with e-dictionaries existing on the market, proposed a prototype of an English-Polish and Polish-English dictionary with a morphological analyser, which analyses derivative forms of words and provides a keyword entry, in this way coping with inflections and handling multi-word lexical items.

After that, Wiktor Gonet and Radosław Święciński presented a comparative analysis of six typical speech analysis programmes (WinCECIL, WASP, Speech Analyser, PCQuirer, PRAAT, SpeechStation), evaluating them with respect to user-friendliness, screen layout, ease of file management, recording and playback, signal editing, time dimension measurements, spectral analysis and the possibility of annotation.

Przemysław Kaszubski, in his presentation on corpus-based research, identified central problems of corpus linguistics (among others representativeness of data and annotation of data). He wanted to investigate Polish learners' idiomatic patterns, and for that reason he extracted examples of lexical fixedness, syntactic fixedness, anomaly and opacity from a few corpora gathered from texts of more and less advanced Polish learners of English.

Elżbieta Gajek presented the results of a survey investigating language teachers' computer literacy, their opinions on the use of computers in teaching and their training needs. The optimistic results show that language teachers are enthusiastic and ready to take up a new challenge of computer-assisted teaching, but proper training is needed to make that possible.

Next, Anatol Shevel showed how to teach the whole class with a multimedia programme on one computer, using programmes very much different from the ones accessible on the market. His programmes are like a computer game, where there is only the content (dialogues, films, animations, etc.), but there are no language activities and the teacher is free to adapt each page of that multimedia book to present what is going to be taught.

When talking about electronic dictionaries and learners of English, Włodzimierz Sobkowiak presented the results of a survey investigating teachers' attitudes to e-dictionaries. The results show that although more than half of subjects know and use at least one computer dictionary, none of the teachers has used it in the classroom, even though most of them have the conditions to do that. The conclusion was that teachers react negatively to computer dictionaries and do not promote them, and that should be amended with proper teacher training.

In her presentation, Lilianna Anioła-Jędrzejek presented the basic premises of the Multimedia Distance Education Course, a project done jointly by three universities in Poland and one in the United Kingdom, and funded by the European Commission. MDEC is a series of specialised multimedia English courses on the Web, which are going to be used in the classes of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the three technical universities involved in the project.

The next speaker, Krzysztof Jagiełowicz, provided a theoretical background to the other presentations by talking about Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and specifically about its advantages (equality, participation at one's own pace and without seeking permission, reduction of context clues relating to race, gender, handicap or status) and problems (flaming, abuse of power and control, lack of response, lack of purpose).

Next, Jarek Krajka discussed the issue of training online teachers of English, giving the necessary qualities such a teacher should posses, as well as reasons why teachers of English should take their instruction online. The author presented the results of surveys conducted among students (pre-service training) and teachers (in-service training), and proposed specific training solutions for both of these environments.

After that, Monika Tarantowicz-Gasiewicz, claiming that there are no established pedagogical standards for student model in CALL, wanted to establish some parameters and arrive at some objective standards. By working out a framework for standards, then choosing a pedagogical theory underlying them, deriving standards from it, she came up with a complex student model in a CALL environment.

Finally, Miłosz Chmiel, talking about speech processing and speech visualisation, showed CSLU Toolkit, a flexible set of programmes used in teaching pronunciation and acoustic phonology, downloadable for free from the following website: http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu. To prove the usefulness of the programme, the presenter showed how the programme works, explained its specific features, gave examples of his own speech recording.

The workshop concluded with a panel discussion of most participants, chaired by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, where the whole workshop was summarised, and most important challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics which appeared in presentations were investigated.

On the whole, CCAAL workshop was extremely successful and all presentations were equally interesting and thought-provoking. It needs to be stressed that the presenters took great care to support their ideas with visual aids such as computer presentations or transparencies, which greatly facilitated comprehension. The proceedings of the workshop are going to published by LINCOM EUROPA by autumn, and meanwhile everyone interested can read the abstracts of the presentations at this URL: http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/~sobkow/ccaalabs.htm. If anyone would like to contact any of the presenters mentioned, please email me at jkrajka@batory.plo.lublin.pl and I will forward your message to a particular author.

CCAAL workshop convenor's comment: please notice that for one 1.5 hour slot the workshop was split into two sessions. Jarek Krajka, as well as the covenor of the workshop, attended one of them. The other one was devoted to natural language processing mostly, and featured presentations by: A.Kupść et.al., M.Marciniak et.al. and M.Derwojedowa. These three are not reported upon in the above, but can of course be found among the abstracts. (W.Sobkowiak)