Welcome

After 13 years EUROCALL returns to Valencia. Some of the more senior members of EUROCALL will recall the 1995 Conference which took place in September that year, hosted by the Department of Modern Languages. Although e-mail was only slowly emerging at the time, EUROCALL '95 was one of the first conferences in Spain to digitise and publish the abstracts of all the presentations on the web. An emerging world wide web that seemed revolutionary at the time. For anybody who might be nostalgic, the 1995 abstracts can still be accessed at http://eurocall.webs.upv.es/euro95/home.htm. The proceedings of the '95 conference are also a valuable witness of what was prominent at the time in relation to CALL and TELL. Looking back we can see that some of the concerns in the mid nineties are still valid today, for example issues such as integrating CALL into the language curriculum, incorporating speech recognition tools into language courseware, parser analysers, interactive learning environments and so forth.

EUROCALL 2009 will also be hosted by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, but this time it will take place at the Higher Polytechnic School of Gandia, also known as the UPV Gandia Campus site. The Gandia campus is located in one of the most privileged Valencian regions known as "La Safor" where the Mediterranean Sea and a historical agricultural tradition meet. Well known for its wide golden beaches, Gandia is also historically renowned for its 14th Century Palacio Ducal, house to the Borgia family.

The 2009 EUROCALL conference will focus on New Trends in Computer Assisted Language Learning with a special emphasis on innovative ways of collaborating and working together in the advancement of language learning and teaching. The conference sub-themes are an example of the numerous branches that have grown out of the CALL tree and is an illustration, we think, of the roots that this area has planted in a collective will to actively contribute towards better understanding and improving language learning with the assistance of information and communications technologies. CALL researchers, developers and practitioners are therefore invited to submit proposals relating to any of the following subthemes which, we think, summarise current interests and concerns in CALL:

• Curriculum development for CALL
• Assessment, testing, feedback and guidance in CALL
• Pedagogical change in technology integration
• Catering for Less Widely Used and Taught Languages in CALL
• Research in new language learning environments
• Innovative e-learning solutions for languages
• Building national/international partnerships for networked language learning
• New role of writing as a tool for communication
• New developments in multimedia courseware design
• Networked language learning in adult education
• Learning Management Systems
• Mobile Learning
• Virtual Worlds
• Corpora
• CALL supported Content Integrated Language Learning (CLIL)
• Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)
• Computer Assisted Translation
• Formal and informal language learning

We look forward to welcoming you to the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia at our Gandia Campus!!

Ana Gimeno Sanz
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Spain