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British learners acquire very little vocabulary in their foreign languages, compared to pupils elsewhere in Europe, particularly learners of English as a foreign language. Could the materials used for teaching help explain this difference? An analysis of the vocabulary loading of a textbook for French as a foreign language commonly used in Britain, Encore Tricolore (Mascie-Taylor and Honnor, 2001, Cheltenham, UK, Nelson Thornes), was carried out with this question in mind. An analysis of the vocabulary suggests that it is not introduced and practised in a way that is conducive to building a sufficiently large vocabulary to reach level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

Morphology consists of inflection and word formation. In foreign language teaching it occurs mainly in the form of inflectional paradigms. While this is certainly an important part of mastering a foreign language, an adequate use of morphology, both inflection and word formation, can facilitate the acquisition of foreign language vocabulary. By applying word formation rules as a way to structure their knowledge, advanced learners can multiply their active vocabulary. A practical problem in using inflectional classes and word formation processes in vocabulary teaching is that the information required to devise exercises is not readily available. In a dictionary, it is not possible to get an overview of word formation relationships or classes of words belonging to the same inflectional class. The nature of word formation processes even makes it impossible in principle to fully cover them in a printed dictionary without creating a lot of redundancy. An electronic dictionary does not automatically solve the problems involved, unless it is structured appropriately. In the Word Manager (WM) project morphological relationships have been taken as a starting point in the design of the lexicon. As a consequence, the lexicon is structured in terms of word formation and inflection rules, in such a way that complete and flexible access to the morphological processes and classes of a language is guaranteed. The full flexibility of WM lexicons requires that the entire system be installed locally. For a dedicated operational component, however, no such installation is necessary. It can be installed as an independently running program or be made available through the Internet. Two such applications (which are freely available) and their possible uses for teaching purposes are described.

Word-formation in second language acquisition 1. Introduction 2. The study of second language acquisition 3. Learning word-formation 4. Types of word-formation processes 5. Conclusion 6. References

Grammar checkers are not reliable enough yet to be used in CALL programs. Their rate of overflagging is still much too high for learners of a foreign language. CALL programs, however, could profit greatly from the incorporation of a grammar checker if this could provide the option of responding more intelligently to students’ input. Several strategies are proposed to make grammar checkers more acceptable for CALL developers, among them adapting the lexicon and the parser in the grammar checker.