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A final tribute to Jos Nivette
.yvsrern. Vol. 18. No. I, pp. Pergamon Press Primed
pk.
131-13-t. in Grenl
IWJ Britam
CETaLL NEWS A FINAL
TRIBUTE
TO JOS NIVETTE
Albert Valdman, President of AILA and successor to Jos Nivette in this office, is the author of the following obituary which first appeared in AILA NEWS/NOUVELLES DE L’AILA. We reproduce it here as our final tribute to Jos Nivette, because Jos was not only a personal friend but an AILA officer who cherished the concept of Educarional Technology and served its cause wherever and whenever possible. Albert has phrased it in a way that cannot be improved: C’est avec une profonde tristesse que j’annonce le deck, apres une longue et douleureuse maladie, de feu notre collegue Jos Nivette. Avec lui c’est un fervent et devoue serviteur de notre association qui vient de disparaitre. En effet, non seulement Jos Nivette avait accumule de longs et brillants etats de service dans l’une des grandes et actives affiliees nationales de I’AILA, 1’Association Belge de Linguistique Appliqute, qu’il prtsida pendant plusieurs an&es, mais durant une douzaine d’anntes, presque la moitie de la vie de l’Association, il assuma toutes les hautes charges au sein du Conseil d’Administration. Nul ancien ou present membre du Conseil n’a deploye autant d’efforts que lui dans des roles aussi multiples et varies. Jos Nivette debuta en 1975 comme membre du Bureau (l’ancienne denomination pour ce qui est devenu aujourd’hui le Conseil d’Administration). Puis il gravit les divers echelons qui en 1984 le me&rent a la presidence: Secretaire-General Adjoint (1978-8 l), SecretaireGeneral (1981-84). Comme il me preceda a ce dernier poste et a la prbidence, je me trouve bien place pour apprecier et rendre hommage a la haute valeur et l’originalite de sa contribution. Habile et meticuleux administrateur, Jos Nivette posa les bases pour deux initiatives qui ont change le caractere de I’AILA. Lorsqu’il assuma la charge de SecretaireGeneral, I’AILA n’avait pas encore obtenu la relation de collaboration (status B) aupres de l’UNESC0, bien que la demande en et3 ete faite des 1975. 11 entrepris le long labeur de la preparation d’un dossier minutieux et solide qu’il ne me resta qu’a mener a bon port pendant le stade final. C’est grace a son devouement que I’AILA peut maintenant assumer le role de principale ANG (NGO) dans le domaine des sciences du langage, un role qu’elle doit a son grand rayonnement international. Ce grand rayonnement international I’AILA le doit en grande partie a la campagne de promotion lancee par Jos Nivette en direction des associations de linguistique appliquee hors d’Europe. 11posa les jalons d’une action qui en six ans allait itablir des liens formels entre des groupes de linguistes appliques sur tous les six continents du globe et aboutir a une federation forte d’une quarantaine de membres qui peut se presenter comme un digne partenaire dans des actions collaboratives avec I’UNESCO. En fait Jos Nivette organisa la premiere initiative de collaboration avec cet organisme sous la forme d’une consultation 131
I?’
sur l’apport de specialiti
CETaLL
CEUS
des nouvelles technolgies et des nouveaux media a I’enseignement des langues dans une perspective de collaboration internationals a Bruxelles en 1986.
Fort de sa grande experience dans plusieurs domaines de la linguistique appliquee, rompu aux negotiations sur le plan international et aux questions juridiques et maniant avec aisance les deux langues de travail de I’Association, Jos Nivette avait toujours une parfaite connaissance des dossiers lors des reunions annuelles du Conseil d’Administration et du Comite International. Cela lui permit de contribuer directement a la plupart des nouvelles initiatives de I’AILA au tours des neuf annees durant lesquelles il assuma de hautes fonctions au sein du CA: modifications des status, reorganisation des commissions scientifiques, pour n’en mentionner que les plus importantes. Enfin, ii ne faudrait pas oublier qu’outre les hautes charges qu’il assuma dans la gestion de I’AILA, Jos Nivette organisa I’un des huit congres internationaux triannuels de linguistique appliquee, entreprise combien ardue et rendue plus difficile par le choix de Bruxelles. C’est que ce site, malgre sa centralite geographique, ne pouvait que decevoir apres Lund. En effet pour cette grande metropole a vocation intereuropeenne une manifestation scientifique a portee internationale est un Cvenement courant. Les bourses locales ne s’etaient pas grandes ouvertes pour ce qui n’etait pour les ediles de la capitale belge qu’un congres parmi tant d’autres. Ainsi en tant que President du Comite d’organisation Jos Nivette dut deployer des tresors d’ingenuite et une ardeur infatigable pour assurer a ses hates le haut niveau de confort, des activites sociales agreables, le soutien logistique et le contexte academique appropries pour la manifestation scientifique de haut niveau qu’ils trouverent au Congres de Bruxelles. Au nom de mes collegues du Conseil d’Administration, dont certains ont eu le plaisir et le privilege de collaborer avec lui pendant un grand nombre d’annees, je tiens a rendre ce dernier hommage a la memoire de notre devoue collegue et a la vision qu’il avait du haut role que I’AILA se devait d’assumer dans la promotion de la linguistique appliquee dans une perspective de collaboration internationale solidaire et egalitaire. Albert Valdman President, AILA
MAN AND THE
MEDIA
III
The third Man and the Media Conference was held on the premises of the Goethe Institut, London, 18-20 September 1989. This was a joint effort by CETaLL (with its convener, Udo Jung, as primus motor), the British Council, the EUROCALL Group, the Goethe Institut, the IATEFL Video SIG and MUESLI. The conference gathered together some of the leading names in European CALL and in both plenary sessions and workshops gave a good overview of the current state of the art. The opening papers by John Higgins (Another look at artificial unintelligence) and Jiirgen Handke (FLINGER-a natural language generator system for CALL) set some of the parameters by contrasting the use of computers as moronic slaves demanding intelligent
133
CETaLL NEWS
manipulation by users with a highly sophisticated program for language generation.
and impressive
grammatico-syntactical
Other papers surveyed progress to date in various aspects of CALL: Jeremy Fox, Error handling in traditional and intelligent CALL; Frank Knowles, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and Tim Hooton, “The computer as a tool for the writer”; Glyn Jones, “The computer as medium.” Dick Davies of the Centre for Electronic Communications and Open Support Systems in Education (CECOMM) at Southampton Institute for Higher Education gave a fascinating demonstration of the possibilities of electronic communication and computersupported cooperative learning (CSCL) using distributed conferencing technology, which has also been used with some success by the Open University.* In workshop sessions, Ulrich Jordan from Hamburg and Lis Kornum of Copenhagen also described experiences with electronic mail and telecommunications in the language classroom. Not unnaturally, demonstrations of new hardware and software applications attracted much interest. Ulrike Meinhof (University of Manchester) presented a HyperCard-based interactive support facility for off-air TV news programs while Maija Tammelin’s workshop showed how Helsinki School of Economics has used HyperCard to develop reading comprehension programs for Business English [see a forthcoming article in System 18(2), 19901. There were demonstrations of various teaching packages by Lis Kornum and Lis Jacobsen of Denmark, Judith Jansson of Amsterdam, Giinther Schmid of Vienna, Ian Morris-Wilson of Oulu (Finland) and Heather Rendall of Hereford and Worcester, who described the use of databases, an area of growing popularity in CALL. Joseph Rezeau’s workshop presentation was entitled: Framework III and telematics: integrating professional tools into language teaching, while Brian Powell gave an initial survey of the new Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Modern Languages (CTICML) at the University of Hull. There was, in fact, so much going on in parallel workshop sessions that it was impossible to get round everything which, while a little frustrating, certainly bore witness to the amount of current activity in CALL. Another interesting plenary session was that of Istvan Kecskes on a multipurpose authoring system developed at Kossuth University in Hungary, while Ake Hggg of Sweden gave a workshop presentation of his own authoring systems for use with EFL learners. Professor KecskCs’ system, which was elaborate but inevitably had restrictions, attracted lively discussion on the degree of complexity possible if an authoring program is to be easily accessible. Two presentations confirmed once again the enormous possibilities and the no less enormous cost of interactive videodisc. The first was a workshop demonstration of EXPODISC SPANISH, the first in a planned series of IV packages for exporters, developed jointly by Ealing College of Higher Education-School of Languages and the Buckinghamshire College Media Resources Centre, and financed by a grant of some f150,OOO from a number of British companies and the Department of Trade and Industry. The final plenary session was conducted by Phil Clymer of the BBC and gave a mouth-watering preview of The *A very informative book on computer-mediated communication and distance education is Robin Mason and Anthony Kaye (eds), Mindweave: Communicafion. Computers and Distance Education. Oxford: Pergamon, 1989. It includes a contribution by Dick Davies.
I!4
CETILL
NE\VS
European Connection, an interactive videocourse also directed at the business market but this time at foreign learners of Business English. It is no coincidence that most videodisc material has appeared in the worlds of science, technology and commerce, but hardware developments should eventually bring the technology within the reach of less vvell-heeled branches of the language teaching profession. On the other hand, a proper exploitation of the programming possibilities of the extensive branching and maze facilities of videodisc will always be extremely time-consuming and will require either outside financing or selfless dedication. Television proper forms the basis for Robert Vanderplank’s original English language learning exercises exploiting unilingual subtitles (see his article in the next issue of Sysfem). Satellite television is likely to be one of the prime sources of “authentic” material in the future, not least because it is neither bilingually subtitled nor dubbed, and some of the extensive development work undertaken at Brighton Polytechnic was described by Brian Hill, aided by Shelagh Rixon and Joe Hambrook. I may very well have forgotten somebody, as it was not always possible to observe everything going on. The conference was certainly very rewarding and CETaLL owes a debt of gratitude to the Goethe Institut under their director Dr Elmar Brandt for providing us with very practical lecture and demonstration rooms in one of London’s many attractive Georgian terraces. Rudolf Berger and the staff of the Institut who were responsible for the local who coorganizational details have our special thanks, as does Udo Jun,, 0 our convener, ordinated the whole conference. It is intended that many of the papers from the conference will keep you informed when details are finalized.
will appear
in print and we
Man and the Media IV will take place in August 1991 in Debrecen, Hungary, where Professor Istvan Kecskes has kindly offered to undertake the arrangements. I look forward to the continued success of this series.
General
Norman Secretary,
F Davies CETaLL
pk.
131-13-t. in Grenl
IWJ Britam
CETaLL NEWS A FINAL
TRIBUTE
TO JOS NIVETTE
Albert Valdman, President of AILA and successor to Jos Nivette in this office, is the author of the following obituary which first appeared in AILA NEWS/NOUVELLES DE L’AILA. We reproduce it here as our final tribute to Jos Nivette, because Jos was not only a personal friend but an AILA officer who cherished the concept of Educarional Technology and served its cause wherever and whenever possible. Albert has phrased it in a way that cannot be improved: C’est avec une profonde tristesse que j’annonce le deck, apres une longue et douleureuse maladie, de feu notre collegue Jos Nivette. Avec lui c’est un fervent et devoue serviteur de notre association qui vient de disparaitre. En effet, non seulement Jos Nivette avait accumule de longs et brillants etats de service dans l’une des grandes et actives affiliees nationales de I’AILA, 1’Association Belge de Linguistique Appliqute, qu’il prtsida pendant plusieurs an&es, mais durant une douzaine d’anntes, presque la moitie de la vie de l’Association, il assuma toutes les hautes charges au sein du Conseil d’Administration. Nul ancien ou present membre du Conseil n’a deploye autant d’efforts que lui dans des roles aussi multiples et varies. Jos Nivette debuta en 1975 comme membre du Bureau (l’ancienne denomination pour ce qui est devenu aujourd’hui le Conseil d’Administration). Puis il gravit les divers echelons qui en 1984 le me&rent a la presidence: Secretaire-General Adjoint (1978-8 l), SecretaireGeneral (1981-84). Comme il me preceda a ce dernier poste et a la prbidence, je me trouve bien place pour apprecier et rendre hommage a la haute valeur et l’originalite de sa contribution. Habile et meticuleux administrateur, Jos Nivette posa les bases pour deux initiatives qui ont change le caractere de I’AILA. Lorsqu’il assuma la charge de SecretaireGeneral, I’AILA n’avait pas encore obtenu la relation de collaboration (status B) aupres de l’UNESC0, bien que la demande en et3 ete faite des 1975. 11 entrepris le long labeur de la preparation d’un dossier minutieux et solide qu’il ne me resta qu’a mener a bon port pendant le stade final. C’est grace a son devouement que I’AILA peut maintenant assumer le role de principale ANG (NGO) dans le domaine des sciences du langage, un role qu’elle doit a son grand rayonnement international. Ce grand rayonnement international I’AILA le doit en grande partie a la campagne de promotion lancee par Jos Nivette en direction des associations de linguistique appliquee hors d’Europe. 11posa les jalons d’une action qui en six ans allait itablir des liens formels entre des groupes de linguistes appliques sur tous les six continents du globe et aboutir a une federation forte d’une quarantaine de membres qui peut se presenter comme un digne partenaire dans des actions collaboratives avec I’UNESCO. En fait Jos Nivette organisa la premiere initiative de collaboration avec cet organisme sous la forme d’une consultation 131
I?’
sur l’apport de specialiti
CETaLL
CEUS
des nouvelles technolgies et des nouveaux media a I’enseignement des langues dans une perspective de collaboration internationals a Bruxelles en 1986.
Fort de sa grande experience dans plusieurs domaines de la linguistique appliquee, rompu aux negotiations sur le plan international et aux questions juridiques et maniant avec aisance les deux langues de travail de I’Association, Jos Nivette avait toujours une parfaite connaissance des dossiers lors des reunions annuelles du Conseil d’Administration et du Comite International. Cela lui permit de contribuer directement a la plupart des nouvelles initiatives de I’AILA au tours des neuf annees durant lesquelles il assuma de hautes fonctions au sein du CA: modifications des status, reorganisation des commissions scientifiques, pour n’en mentionner que les plus importantes. Enfin, ii ne faudrait pas oublier qu’outre les hautes charges qu’il assuma dans la gestion de I’AILA, Jos Nivette organisa I’un des huit congres internationaux triannuels de linguistique appliquee, entreprise combien ardue et rendue plus difficile par le choix de Bruxelles. C’est que ce site, malgre sa centralite geographique, ne pouvait que decevoir apres Lund. En effet pour cette grande metropole a vocation intereuropeenne une manifestation scientifique a portee internationale est un Cvenement courant. Les bourses locales ne s’etaient pas grandes ouvertes pour ce qui n’etait pour les ediles de la capitale belge qu’un congres parmi tant d’autres. Ainsi en tant que President du Comite d’organisation Jos Nivette dut deployer des tresors d’ingenuite et une ardeur infatigable pour assurer a ses hates le haut niveau de confort, des activites sociales agreables, le soutien logistique et le contexte academique appropries pour la manifestation scientifique de haut niveau qu’ils trouverent au Congres de Bruxelles. Au nom de mes collegues du Conseil d’Administration, dont certains ont eu le plaisir et le privilege de collaborer avec lui pendant un grand nombre d’annees, je tiens a rendre ce dernier hommage a la memoire de notre devoue collegue et a la vision qu’il avait du haut role que I’AILA se devait d’assumer dans la promotion de la linguistique appliquee dans une perspective de collaboration internationale solidaire et egalitaire. Albert Valdman President, AILA
MAN AND THE
MEDIA
III
The third Man and the Media Conference was held on the premises of the Goethe Institut, London, 18-20 September 1989. This was a joint effort by CETaLL (with its convener, Udo Jung, as primus motor), the British Council, the EUROCALL Group, the Goethe Institut, the IATEFL Video SIG and MUESLI. The conference gathered together some of the leading names in European CALL and in both plenary sessions and workshops gave a good overview of the current state of the art. The opening papers by John Higgins (Another look at artificial unintelligence) and Jiirgen Handke (FLINGER-a natural language generator system for CALL) set some of the parameters by contrasting the use of computers as moronic slaves demanding intelligent
133
CETaLL NEWS
manipulation by users with a highly sophisticated program for language generation.
and impressive
grammatico-syntactical
Other papers surveyed progress to date in various aspects of CALL: Jeremy Fox, Error handling in traditional and intelligent CALL; Frank Knowles, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and Tim Hooton, “The computer as a tool for the writer”; Glyn Jones, “The computer as medium.” Dick Davies of the Centre for Electronic Communications and Open Support Systems in Education (CECOMM) at Southampton Institute for Higher Education gave a fascinating demonstration of the possibilities of electronic communication and computersupported cooperative learning (CSCL) using distributed conferencing technology, which has also been used with some success by the Open University.* In workshop sessions, Ulrich Jordan from Hamburg and Lis Kornum of Copenhagen also described experiences with electronic mail and telecommunications in the language classroom. Not unnaturally, demonstrations of new hardware and software applications attracted much interest. Ulrike Meinhof (University of Manchester) presented a HyperCard-based interactive support facility for off-air TV news programs while Maija Tammelin’s workshop showed how Helsinki School of Economics has used HyperCard to develop reading comprehension programs for Business English [see a forthcoming article in System 18(2), 19901. There were demonstrations of various teaching packages by Lis Kornum and Lis Jacobsen of Denmark, Judith Jansson of Amsterdam, Giinther Schmid of Vienna, Ian Morris-Wilson of Oulu (Finland) and Heather Rendall of Hereford and Worcester, who described the use of databases, an area of growing popularity in CALL. Joseph Rezeau’s workshop presentation was entitled: Framework III and telematics: integrating professional tools into language teaching, while Brian Powell gave an initial survey of the new Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Modern Languages (CTICML) at the University of Hull. There was, in fact, so much going on in parallel workshop sessions that it was impossible to get round everything which, while a little frustrating, certainly bore witness to the amount of current activity in CALL. Another interesting plenary session was that of Istvan Kecskes on a multipurpose authoring system developed at Kossuth University in Hungary, while Ake Hggg of Sweden gave a workshop presentation of his own authoring systems for use with EFL learners. Professor KecskCs’ system, which was elaborate but inevitably had restrictions, attracted lively discussion on the degree of complexity possible if an authoring program is to be easily accessible. Two presentations confirmed once again the enormous possibilities and the no less enormous cost of interactive videodisc. The first was a workshop demonstration of EXPODISC SPANISH, the first in a planned series of IV packages for exporters, developed jointly by Ealing College of Higher Education-School of Languages and the Buckinghamshire College Media Resources Centre, and financed by a grant of some f150,OOO from a number of British companies and the Department of Trade and Industry. The final plenary session was conducted by Phil Clymer of the BBC and gave a mouth-watering preview of The *A very informative book on computer-mediated communication and distance education is Robin Mason and Anthony Kaye (eds), Mindweave: Communicafion. Computers and Distance Education. Oxford: Pergamon, 1989. It includes a contribution by Dick Davies.
I!4
CETILL
NE\VS
European Connection, an interactive videocourse also directed at the business market but this time at foreign learners of Business English. It is no coincidence that most videodisc material has appeared in the worlds of science, technology and commerce, but hardware developments should eventually bring the technology within the reach of less vvell-heeled branches of the language teaching profession. On the other hand, a proper exploitation of the programming possibilities of the extensive branching and maze facilities of videodisc will always be extremely time-consuming and will require either outside financing or selfless dedication. Television proper forms the basis for Robert Vanderplank’s original English language learning exercises exploiting unilingual subtitles (see his article in the next issue of Sysfem). Satellite television is likely to be one of the prime sources of “authentic” material in the future, not least because it is neither bilingually subtitled nor dubbed, and some of the extensive development work undertaken at Brighton Polytechnic was described by Brian Hill, aided by Shelagh Rixon and Joe Hambrook. I may very well have forgotten somebody, as it was not always possible to observe everything going on. The conference was certainly very rewarding and CETaLL owes a debt of gratitude to the Goethe Institut under their director Dr Elmar Brandt for providing us with very practical lecture and demonstration rooms in one of London’s many attractive Georgian terraces. Rudolf Berger and the staff of the Institut who were responsible for the local who coorganizational details have our special thanks, as does Udo Jun,, 0 our convener, ordinated the whole conference. It is intended that many of the papers from the conference will keep you informed when details are finalized.
will appear
in print and we
Man and the Media IV will take place in August 1991 in Debrecen, Hungary, where Professor Istvan Kecskes has kindly offered to undertake the arrangements. I look forward to the continued success of this series.
General
Norman Secretary,
F Davies CETaLL