Originally created to provide data for linguistic research, corpora are increasingly attracting the attention of researchers in applied linguistics. This study raises and discusses a number of issues concerning the consultation of a specialised corpus of research articles in French by teachers and writers (in both cases non-native speakers of French), writing essays, theses and research articles. A one-million word corpus of research articles in French (Chambers & Le Baron 2007) will be used as an example. After examining issues relating to the creation of the corpus and giving a brief account of publications on the use of corpora as a resource for writing, pedagogic applications of the corpus will be discussed, taking the use of the first person plural, nous, as an example. This will enable us to assess the potential of specialised corpora in language learning and teaching in general and, more particularly, in the learning and teaching of writing.

The spelling of the vowel sound /i/ in Greek inflections depends on the morphological status of the word involved, whereas no morphological spelling rule determines the correct spelling for this sound in word stems. We report the results of a 13-month longitudinal study in which we investigated the spellings by 105 Greek children of the sound /i/ both in stems and in inflections in real words, and in pseudo-word inflections too. The children were generally more successful with words in which the correct spelling of the sound was a single letter ("i" and "h") than when it was a digraph ("ei" and "oi"). Rote learning and also morphological-rule learning both clearly contributed to the correct spelling of "i", "h", "ei", and "oi".

Today, the reflection about the potential of ICT for language learning and teaching unfolds in several directions. To the contribution of multimodality in learning environments is now added that of the new devices for communication and collaboration. We examine these contributions in a systematic manner in relation to the specific position of the foreign language (L2) writer as well as to his/her activity and production. After clarification of the concepts of writing and of learning how to write, and of our definitions of a few terms, I present the key concepts and factors that I believe should be taken into account in analyzing the ICT resources supporting the learning of L2 writing, then I present the devices themselves and their functionalities, in order to establish how they meet the criteria that have been outlined.

The attitude of native speakers of Creoles with regard to written Creoles and vis-a-vis the "standardizing" efforts of linguists is an important subject which needs to be constantly re-examined. In the face of the general trend towards the standardization of Creole graphic systems, the reaction of speakers, themselves potential writers, has changed very little. The militants, for their part, would like to see all obstacles to written Creole swiftly removed in those places where Creoles writing is not in favor. Different cases involving different countries must be taken into account in order to arrive at a better understanding of the kinds of situations in which written Creole languages develop, whatever the degree to which diglossia or even various types of multilingualism may be present.

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".

The main organising feature of the Chinese writing system is the ideophonetic compound - that is, a character structure with two elements, a semantic radical, which gives a clue to the meaning of the character, and a phonological component, which gives a clue to the pronunciation. In a previous investigation, it was shown that children use this character structure when learning novel Chinese characters (Tsai & Nunes, in press): pseudo-characters that fit the ideophonetic compound structure were learned more easily than those that violate it, irrespective of the children's age and of testing mode (reading or writing). The aim of this study was to examine further how this character schema affects children's learning by varying the level of agreement between the pseudo-characters and the ideophonetic compound structure and the type of phonological rules used in obtaining pronunciation. In our experiments learning was significantly affected independently by the transparency of the semantic radical and the regularity of the phonological component.