This document provides an overview of using latent semantic analysis (LSA) and the R programming language for language technology enhanced learning applications. It describes using LSA to create a semantic space to compare documents and evaluate student writings. It also demonstrates clustering terms based on their semantic similarity and visualizing networks in R. Evaluation results show LSA machine scores for essay quality had a Spearman's rank correlation of 0.687 with human scores, outperforming a pure vector space model.