Introduction: l2 learning/teaching and technology: a ‘call’ for a change?

Abstract

Although technology has assumed a vital place in people’s life and in all fields of knowledge, research on the interface between second/foreign language teaching/learning and technology, despite being a flourishing field, is still in its infancy stage, being a relatively new enterprise (Thomas & reinders, 2010), especially in the Brazilian context. not that long ago, in the mid 70’s, computers came into the scene of second/foreign language teaching/learning and since then the development of computer aided Language Learning (caLL) has reflected theories of learning (Warschauer, 1996). as an attempt to systematize knowledge derived from the use of computers for teaching/learning purposes, caLL has been categorized into three phases: the behaviorist, the communicative, and the integrative. The first phase was implemented in the 60’s and 70’s, and it was based on behaviorist theories of learning, in which the idea of repetition is essential for learning. The second phase took place in the late 70’s and the beginning of the 80’s, heavily based on the communicative approach, underlain by the idea of developing authentic communication, finally, the last phase, the integrative, initiated in the late 80’s, and characterizes new perspectives in using technology associated with the teaching of second/foreign languages, specially based on blending multiple language skills with a myriad of on-line and/or off-line pedagogical resources. from the 90’s on, although the focus still relies on integration, there is a plethora of SLa theories grounding research in this field (Thomas & reinders, 2010) and more specifically a focus on the use of tasks. It has been claimed that there is a close intersection between research on tasks and caLL, from a task-based perspective, in that tasks are viewed as a central construct for theory building allowing for testing hypotheses about the processes involved in second language acquisition (ellis, 2010).