ABSTRACT
The use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in language education is almost two decades old; however, such is the pace of technological changes and their rapid assimilation into everyday life that relatively early articles on the use of CMC by language educators, like those collected in an important early volume on network-based language teaching edited by Warschauer and Kern (2000), now seem both shrewdly prescient and somewhat quaint. In their introduction, Warschauer and Kern (2000, 1–19) sketch out the then still largely unrealized potential for the use of CMC in language education and contrast the use of the computer as a mediating tool with earlier uses of computers to promote structural accuracy and interlingual development through grammatical and communicative exercises, respectively. They observe that the use of CMC represents a paradigm shift in language education, in that now, often for the first time, learners in many corners of the world enjoy the opportunity to engage directly in asynchronous or synchronous interaction with other users of the target language, whether these other users are native or second-language speakers. Of course, this opportunity changes everything: the computer has been transformed from a glorified interactive textbook into a portal to the rest of the globe. Warschauer and Kern (2000, 13) neatly characterize the role of CMC in this new era as being “to provide alternative contexts for social interaction; to facilitate access to existing discourse communities and the creation of new ones.”
