A couple of the students in Activity 7 mentioned reading aloud as a preferred exercise, and this is a good idea, with certain provisos. Students need to be made aware that this is a pronunciation exercise and does not constitute speaking practice (as the surveyed students appear to believe). Secondly, it is not a task that students can practise entirely in isolation: given the inevitable lack of feedback, they may simply be compounding their errors. It is a simple matter to provide passages for stand-alone reading practice, with an accompanying audio-tape against which students can monitor their performance. Either pre-recorded material can be used, or passages can be recorded using colloquial assistants. Also encourage students to record themselves so that they can review their performance retrospectively.

Finding IT resources to help students to practice speaking is a more difficult task, as the technology that allows software to recognize and process what students say is limited. Pachler (2002) reviews the current state of the technology, and assesses what it can and cannot do. Closed response programmes, which require responses from a limited repertoire (eg multiple-choice) are simpler than those which can cope with open responses, where every possible answer to questions has been anticipated, including mistakes. Often programmes using Speech Recognition technology are speaker dependent, and have to be trained to recognize the voice of their user, which is incompatible with language laboratory or language library use. (For further discussion of the role of ICT in language learning, see Pachler, 1999.)

A fully flexible programme which allows open-ended conversation, and can correct both syntactical and pronunciation mistakes, and those of usage, has yet to be developed, but within the limitations of the technology there are packages available:

• Triple Play Plus, available for French and Spanish at beginners level, allows the user to play games with the computer (therefore using a limited repertoire of responses, and includes a voice-recording feature (http://www.cd-teacher.com/foreign.html).
  
  
• TeLL me More, reviewed by Pachler (2002), claims to assess pronunciation and correct mistakes. It is available in eight languages, at up to three levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced), and again the repertoire is broad but limited: interactive dialogues of 550 sentences and 15,000 words in the French beginners' version (http://www.auralog.com/en/tellmemore.html).