VIENA Classroom is a distance education system in which the teaching material is prepared as hypermedia documents and presented to the students within a CSCW environment. By applying language engineering techniques to the question support facilities of the system we create a multimodal natural language interface so that the students can formulate their questions directly in Japanese. Based on the computed semantic representations the questions are either answered by accessing a FAQ knowledge base or collected and transferred to the teacher for later processing. As valuable assistance for formulating questions we provide the possibility to browse through automatically generated FAQ lists. Language engineering is performed in an integrated framework by utilizing deductive object-oriented database technology.