While online teaching in post-compulsory education is the focus of much research today, the training of online tutors has largely been neglected. Most papers do not go beyond dealing with the technical skills that are needed to teach in an online environment. This article outlines a framework for tutor training, starting with a brief overview of benefits and challenges for online language tutors. On the basis of several years' experience with teaching languages using a synchronous online environment and training tutors for online language courses, we suggest a pyramid of skills necessary for successful online teaching. These include the more general skills of dealing with the technology and using its advantages, the social skills of community building, language teaching skills, and the skills to teach creatively and develop a personal teaching style in an online medium. The article then suggests how these skills can be implemented in a training programme, which includes both pre-course training and ongoing staff development.

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The introduction of virtual learning environments has made new tools available that have the potential to support learner communication and interaction, thus aiding second language acquisition both from a psycholinguistic and a sociocultural point of view. This article focuses on the use of videoconferencing in the context of a larger exploratory study to find out how interaction was influenced by the affordances of the environment. Taking a mainly qualitative approach, the authors analysed the written and spoken interaction in recorded videoconferencing sessions, alongside examining some quantitative data to reveal participation patterns. Exploring language learning interaction in a synchronous online medium allows us to show how this is a process mediated by interaction with experts and peers as well as by the artefacts used (e.g., technology) and how learners use and combine multiple modes to make meaning. Our findings illustrate how an online videoconferencing environment with its multiple modalities can be used in language teaching, how teachers and learners adapt to the multimodal online environment and how new patterns of communication emerge in the process.

This article will start with the situation at the Open University, where languages are taught at a distance. Online tuition using an audio-graphic Internet-based conferencing system called Lyceum is one of the ways used to develop students' communicative skills. Following Garrett's call for an integration of research and practice at EUROCALL 1997 (Garrett, 1998) -a call which is still valid today -the present article proposes a conceptual framework which can support the use of conferencing systems such as Lyceum in language learning and teaching. In the first part of the article, I examine several pedagogical theories supporting language learning, that is, second language acquisition and sociocultural theories, and multimodality, and apply them to the practice of audio-graphic computer-mediated communication (CMC) as used at the Open University. I also build on previous research, which, however, is still dominated by written CMC. What Erben stated in 1999 is still true: that audio-graphic technology "remains underresearched and under-theorised." (Erben, 1999:230). Firstly, I therefore examine studies on written CMC and secondly those that have been conducted on audio-graphic CMC in order to identify the benefits and challenges of these media.Both the pedagogical theory and previous studies of CMC have informed the design and implementation of online tuition at the Open University. Thus the second part of the article reports on a research project on Lyceum, which took place in 2002. The goal of the project was to evaluate the use of audio-graphic conferencing in practice, and this in turn has instigated both improvements in the software used and in student support as well as further changes to the task design. I present some findings and discuss both the challenges of audio-graphic conferencing that were encountered and the benefits that were identified.

This paper considers the skills that enable teachers to foster interaction and collaboration in online language learning. Drawing on Hampel and Stickler's (2005) skills pyramid for online language learning and teaching, it presents the pre-service and in-service training programme that Associate Lecturers in the Department of Languages at the Open University undergo in the context of teaching languages with the help of online communication tools. Two projects are presented that shed more light on the expertise required to teach languages in complex virtual learning environments. The first project highlights the skills that are needed to teach in a complex online environment; the second one presents a teacher training study which aimed to find out more about distance teachers' experience of facilitating online group work, identify development needs, try out the potential of particular asynchronous and synchronous tools to support collaborative learning, and trial possible development activities. The paper concludes by describing the kind of training programme that tutors require in order to acquire the skills identified.