Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Electronic resources for language teaching and learning: cornucopia or information overload?

However, I have also encountered problems with the students: there is much initial reluctance to engage in hands-on activities. Many participants on the courses are embarrassed at their poor keyboard skills, or their lack of familiarity with computer systems. In many cases, this is quite understandable: they are away from their own computers, being asked to use a strange machine and strange software, to do tasks which they have never before attempted to do. So even now, whatever facilities are promised, I always take my notes and examples of corpus data with me in the form of OHP transparencies. You never know what technical problems may arise... 5. Currently available resources: problems Anyone who wishes to see what advances have been made in corpora in the past few years need only look at Michael Barlow's website (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/corpus.html), or visit the site of one of the world's major centres for language engineering resources, such as ELRA (European Language Resources Association: http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html) or LDC (The Linguistic Data Consortium: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/). I am currently a member of the Language Learner's Workbench team of the European Commission-funded SELECT research project (Strategies for European LE-Enhanced Communication Training: EC Project LE4-8304) at the University of Wolverhampton (http://www.wlv.ac.uk/select/). A few months ago (just before the Sogndal course in October 1998) I collated and edited a review of existing language learning and language engineering resources and tools for the SELECT project. I was overwhelmed by the vast amounts of resources and tools now available, and the review eventually grew to 90-pages! For example, the review evaluated 12 CD-Rom products and 17 websites that catered for people learning Business English, and 14 CD-Rom products and 31 websites for students of general English. Language engineering resources included 16 speech corpora, 8 automatic translation systems, dozens of terminology banks, and so on. As a simple illustration, here is a selection of webpages that offer help with English grammar: http://www.ihes.com/Sresource/Sstudy/adverborder.html 22