Students from nine to twelve years old corresponded by e-mail in order to revise adventure stories they had written. The protocol differentiated the two roles: tutors providing critical advice to their partners vs receptors-users of these criticisms. In this context, each participant produced and revised four texts during a school year. Comparing the two versions of the texts and the improvement of the writers' skills between the first and last texts highlighted the different impact of peer tutoring according to the role and the level of students. The protocol appears to have contributed, particularly among producers of criticism, to a better conceptualization of the genre and to a progressive appropriation of processes which are necessary to master writing.

The aim of this paper is to offer new elements to the discussion on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in foreign language learning. In particular, we want to know how chats, forums and face-to-face work can contribute to the achievement of a written macro-task in FFL (French as a Foreign Language). We base our analysis on a computer-mediated learning system, based on both face-to-face and distance sessions via forums and chatting between French-learning Cypriot students and FFL teachers-to-be. Two types of data are considered: synchronous and asynchronous interaction data and questionnaires which were administered to the participants at the end of the project.

This paper presents and evaluates, with a qualitative approach, a learning scenario based on an online piece of software and aimed at supporting Thai university students during their writing process in French as a foreign language. The scenario included software prompting aids, immediate access to texts of the same type (thus connecting reading and writing), and easy text sharing and commenting (peer feedback) through a LMS (Moodle). The paper analyses how far these three pedagogic principles were supported by the scenario, what were the limits of this support and how the scenario ought to be improved. The methodology consisted in cross-checking various data: software prompts, students' texts and comments, semi directive interviews.

For spell and grammar checkers to be useful, they need to be geared towards language learners. In this paper, we focus on spelling, grammar and style checkers, which have been specifically designed for learners of French and English, some of them evolving towards real writing aids. We examine the features of the programs on the market which characterise this evolution towards real writing aids. This paper examines the capabilities of these writing tools when faced with a corpus of learner-written production and evaluates the opportunities these findings present us with as well as the challenges that lay ahead for an efficient integration within a foreign language learning environment focusing on written expression.

The communication and collaboration tools that are available on the web 2.0 offer new opportunities for teaching and learning languages. We present here the results of two similar experiments on collaborative writing for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We show that working with Wikipedia initiates a real collaborative process between the students, the Wikipedian Community and the teacher and that this kind of task - which includes real social interactions - is a motivating factor for the learners. Based on these results we promote the implementation of real life tasks and of an "interactional approach".