Human language, however, is not necessarily propositional. And in any case human utterances actualise much more than what is predicated by the propositional content they may have. Thus, over the centuries, another current of language studies has developed as well, one that sees ordinary speech as the concrete expression of situated meaning, revealing both an individual psychology and a people's mind set or Weltanschauung. The present paper will try to justify this second linguistic current and, with it, the teaching of cross-cultural communication as a redefinition of one's existential stance.

Europe can become ‘united in diversity’ only by helping its citizens internalise experientially their composite cultural identity as Europeans. Merely conceptual ‘understanding’ of the other cultures is insufficient to promote genuine mutual respect and real opportunities for synergy across frontiers. An example is given of how experiential internalisation can be facilitated by teaching languages as culture.

The BLITS system described in this paper is a casebasedsystemdesignedto help usersdraft effective business letters in English. The typical end user has at least a secondary school education, is computer literate, and knows the English one learns at school or university (how to write correctly, but not how to write effectively). The learning support offered by BLITS is based on two modern educational approaches: constructivism and self-directed learning. BLITS does not teach “rules” for writing effectively and does not offer step by step training in convertingideas andintents into a well-written letter. On the contrary, the system leaves it up to users to make judgments of what effective writing meansin a given situation, taking into consideration a number of suggestedalternatives and the results those texts obtained in previous correspondence. It is therefore the developmentof the learner’s judgment– the capacity to choose words judiciously instead of applying rote formulas –that makesworkingwith BLITS, likeall constructivist-inspired learning aids, a truly educational experience.

The BLITS system described in this paper is a case- based system designed to help users draft effective busi- ness letters in English. The typical end user has at least a secondary school education, is computer liter- ate, and knows the English one learns at school or uni- versity (how to write correctly, but not how to write effectively). The learning support offered by BLITS is based on two modern educational approaches: con- structivism and self-directed learning. BLITS does not teach "rules" for writing effectively and does not offer step by step training in converting ideas and intents into a well-written letter. On the contrary, the system leaves it up to users to make judgments of what effective writ- ing means in a given situation, taking into consideration a number of suggested alternatives and the results those texts obtained in previous correspondence. It is there- fore the development of the learner's judgment - the ca- pacity to choose words judiciously instead of applying rote formulas - that makes working with BLITS, like all constructivist-inspired learning aids, a truly educational experience.

The Business Letter Tutor discussed here and described more fully in [10] hips office staff learn to correspond more effectively (in their native language but also in any foreign language) by getting them to define their goals and then retrieving and displaying appropriate excerpts from a database of letters of proven value appropriately tagged paragraph by paragraph. Thr:present paper describes two problems encountered while developing the prototype of the system, as well as the solutions devised, now being implemented. The lessons learned are: (i) the sophisticated meta-language used to tag the paragraphs of the letters stored in the database cannot be used to furnish the user with categories of letter writing styles and strategies from which to choose; another "meta-meta-language" must be created, couched in everyday language and based not-on conceptual categories but on pragmatic goals; (ii) the user will, with time, tend to get into a rut and choose the same rhetorical strategies and even the very same letters over and over, simply because they work at least minimally; thus, to guarantee the educational value of the Tutor and to get the user to explore new ways of writing effectively, the System must incorporate an additional component in the form of an Overseer with a "personality" of its own, capable of suggesting (but not imposing) different approaches to a specific writing task.

Times have changed and language learning goals with them. Students in post-industrial societies now require a “cultural communicative” approach, based on treating speech as “historical will” and on introjecting the target culture’s Weltanschauung (mind-set) together with its linguistic system. In this kind of teaching, computers may be used to rehearse the classroom simulations which prepare for real-life interaction. Cultural-communicative work on the computer is perceived as non-mechanical and genuinely aids the process of interiorizing the new mind-set. A pilot CALL program, written in LISP on a MacIntosh platform, is described. It illustrates how a tested cultural-communicative classroom practice, “Conversation Rebuilding”, lends itself to a (no-frills) implementation on an ordinary PC.

Computer-Based Training (CBT) can teach procedural expertise inexpensively yet effectively if a holistic, self-directed instructional paradigm is used. The case-based reasoning (CBR) system described here - of which the CBR engine, written in JAVA, is fully operative - helps office staff write effective business letters in English. It retrieves and displays suitable excerpts from a stock of letters of proven value stored in a database; users can cut and paste the excerpts together to create a new letter. The burden of judging how suitable the excerpts actually are to the case at hand - and how to go about adjusting them to current circumstances - is left entirely to users. It is assumed that, in a business environment, they will want to produce (and have a way of recognizing) satisfactory end products: their final choices may therefore be considered the ''expertise'' from which the system can learn. The system is based on two major components: the User Modeling component and the Training component. The first builds a representation of user characteristics and goals by replicating a case-based indexing function in an artificial neural network. Pedagogically the system is equally hybrid. While espousing ''self-directed/holistic'' learning, the system also offers, on demand, practice in acquiring specific sub-skills (e.g. how to write paragraph transitions): these mini-lessons constitute ''imperative/sequential'' teaching of the traditional kind. The system displays a series of ''slides'' expounding concepts or offering drill work, assembled ad hoc by the system's Training component. The latter draws upon ''slide sequence'' repertoires that human teachers of ''Business Communication'' have judged appropriate for given categories of users, as well as repertoires that the system itself has created in the past in response to particular user goals and characteristics. The ''slides'', indexed through a discrimination network, are retrieved bq means of an algorithm which combines discrimination search and serial search, thus guaranteeing effectiveness and efficiency. The Training System may therefore be considered, in its own right, a flexible, domain-independent CBT shell useful for any kind of imperative, sequential teaching.

This paper shows how an innovative “communicative” technique in teaching foreign languages—Conversation Rebuilding (CR)—readily lends itself to implementation in an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Classroom language teachers using CR get students to formulate acceptable utterances in a foreign idiom by starting from rough approximations (using words the students know) and gradually zeroing in on the utterance which a native speaker of that idiom might produce in a similar setting. The ITS presented here helps students do the “zeroing in” optimally. It lets them express themselves temporarily in an “interlingua” (i.e., in their own kind of French or English or whatever they are studying), as long as they make something of their communicative intent clear, that is, as long as the System can find a semantic starting point on which to build. The ITS then prods the students to express themselves more intelligibly, starting from the “key” elements (determined by a heuristic based on how expert classroom teachers proceed) and taking into consideration the students' past successful or unsuccessful attempts at communication. To simplify system design and programming, however, conversations are “constrained”: students playact characters in set dialogs and aim at coming up with what the characters actually say (not what they could possibly say). While most Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) focuses the attention of students on norms to acquire, the ICALL implementation of CR presented in this paper focuses the attention of students on saying something—indeed, almost anything—to keep the conversation going and get some kind of meaning across to the other party. It sees successful language acquisition primarily as the association of forms with intent, not simply as the conditioning of appropriate reflexes or the elaboration/recall of conceptualized rules (which are the by-products of successful communication). Thus, in espousing this hard-line communicative approach, the present paper makes a first, non-trivial point: ICALL researchers might usefully begin by investigating what the more able teachers are doing in the classroom, rather than by building elaborate computer simulations of out-dated practices, as happens all too often. The paper then goes on to describe the architecture of a prototype ITS based on CR—one that the authors have actually implemented and tested—for the acquisition of English as a foreign language. A sample learning session is transcribed to illustrate the man-machine interaction. Concluding remarks show how the present-day limits of ICALL (and Artificial Intelligence in general) can be partially circumvented by the strategy implemented in the program, i.e. by making the students feel they are creatively piloting an interaction rather than being tested by an unimaginative machine.

Researchers and practitioners in the field of language instruction largely agree today that proficiency in a foreign language requires more than grammatical competence: it requires a kind of know-how they call "communicative competence", of which grammatical competence is but a subset. The present paper claims that, although this view of language learning has been prominent for over a generation (Hymes seminal paper "On communicative competence" dates back to 1966), it has had little impact on Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) projects. Indeed, CALL systems regularly use the most recent and technologically advanced hardware/software resources to implement the most out- dated grammar-based pedagogy; thus, the total instructional value of such systems is undercut by the very didactics they (often quite ingeniously) embody. In the present paper, a case is made for "Conversational Rebuilding", a recent trend in "communicative teaching" that has been implemented in a textbased CALL system built around a Common LISP Artificial Intelligence engine on a MacIntosh platform. It is argued that a system of this kind is likely to give more instructional value than systems using more sophisticated interfaces or architectures but which embody more traditional language teaching methods.