Improving listening and speaking skills in English through the use of authoring systems

This paper deals more with what is sent down the pipe than with the pipe itself. In other words our concern is more with the pedagogical quality of software than with hardware or structures. It simply aims at presenting several attempts to resolve problems of understanding and speaking English met by French students. In every one of these attempts we have resorted to information technology. More particularly we have used authoring toolkits in order to ‘feed’ computers with our teaching methods adapted to the students′ needs. We have fried to keep a critical eye on our practice, which has enabled us to find answers with a limited scope even though we hope they might be of interest as a starting point for new reflections. The software we have developed represents those answers.