Writing in postsecondary foreign language contexts in North America has received far less attention in the curriculum than the development of oral proficiency. This article describes one institution's process of confronting the challenges not only of recognizing the contribution of writing to students' overall linguistic development, but also of implementing a program-wide process of assessing writing proficiency. The article reports writing proficiency ratings that were collected over a 5-year period for more than 4,000 learners in 10 languages, poses questions regarding the proficiency levels that postsecondary learners achieved across 2 years of foreign language instruction, and relates writing proficiency scores to Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview ratings for a subset of students. The article also articulates the crucial relationship between professional development and writing as well as the role of technology in collecting and assessing writing samples.

Introduction Learner training for computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is a process aimed at promoting the development of technology competence specifically for the purpose of second language acquisition. As evidence of its growing recognition in language teaching, the recent framework document for the TESOL technology standards (Healey et al., 2009) lays out a set of performance indicators for language learners, with the implicit assumption that teachers are responsible for training the students to achieve them. Beyond that general competence, though, is the more specific competence needed to use technology successfully within a given environment, task, or software program. Since this is a more widely, though still quite inadequately, studied area, it will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. It should be noted, however, that many of the points discussed here are also relevant for developing general competence for using technology in language learning. In line with the theme of this edited volume, the purpose of the present chapter is to explore diversity in learner training for CALL. Specifically, we will look at two distinct dimensions: diversity in the training process and diversity in the individuals and groups undergoing the training. By combining these two in a single work, we hope to achieve the goal of providing a broad overview of the possibilities for learner training along with a description of some of the issues that remain to be resolved in accommodating the diversity inherent in groups and individuals. From our experiences with CALL learner training over the past few years, it is clear that both the collective and the individual perspectives need to be addressed to improve the effectiveness of this endeavor.

This paper addresses the comprehension of relative clauses in audio prompts using online listening exercises implemented in a classroom. Reaction time to short and long sentences containing subject and object relative clauses was assessed in subjects attending an intensive ESL course for graduate students. The results indicate the possibility that learners shift resources when processing more syntactically complex audio prompts, such as those with object relatives. This shift from a discrete measure such as accuracy to a continuous variable like reaction time accommodates theoretical frameworks which do not rely on categorical paradigms of learning.

Despite the foreign language community's historical interest in employing technology to support language learning, few research studies have linked its use to instructional outcomes and most have failed to address whether technology enhancements lead to increased proficiency gains. This article examines the relationship between technology use and student performance in a Spanish language program at a research university. Through classroom observation and student and instructor self-reports, coupled with proficiency data from first- and second-year courses, this project investigated the type and distribution of technology use, instructors' and students' perceptions of the value of technology use, and the relationship between observed and perceived technology use and the exit proficiency ratings of student participants. The study found that students and instructors used technology to varying degrees and valued different types of technology use in language learning but viewed face-to-face communication as most essential. In addition, regardless of very different technology implementations among instructors and courses, students' proficiency ratings reached the expected exit level for each course and were remarkably consistent among individuals.