ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how the field has developed, moving away from its earlier focus on demonstrating the 'advantages' of technology, to their current understanding of its affordances and constraints. It also reviews the relationship between second language acquisition (SLA) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL). The chapter shows how CALL research has increasingly drawn on research in SLA and, in recent years, is starting to exert its own influence on the understanding of SLA processes. It focuses on the 10 principles of SLA identified by Ellis to illustrate this relationship, and concludes with a number of future directions for the field. An important area of research is the provision of interaction with other people through various forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Research into CMC for language learning has undergone transformations that largely follow technical developments, and have included text chat, email, audio conferencing and video conferencing, and more recently, social networking.
