Historical Background LAMY, M.N.; HAMPEL, R. Online communication in language learning and teaching. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Bruno Oliveira Maciel Marco Antônio Pereira Couto

1.1 The Emergency of Computer-mediated Communications for Language Learning and Teaching  CMC has been interest of teachers, learners and researchers: (1989) – (Mason and Kayne)  Mindweave: Mason and Kayne’s classic book => Disscuss the Idea of CMC.  The book is about online communication through language learning. –  Lots of Acronyms were created but CALL was integrated to CMC forming CMCL (mid-1990) ;  What has happened to CMCL along the way and influenced the shape it has today?  Lots of different forms of computer-mediated communication were created and they were similar to CMCL at times and other times different from it.  The three strongest shapes are CMC, CALL and socio-personal CMC  The generic education CMC and CMCL had common interests in the idea of learning communities and other computer relations associated to this one.  CMCL was more resolutely divergent. (Warschauer and Healy )

 A view of the History of CALL Behaviouristic: the computer supplies drills to a learner. There is a move through the 80’s generating the communicative CALL. The computer is regarded to have the right answer. CALL used technology to have the learning process more interactive and for opening. From the 90’s up to 2000 CALL begin to be integrated. Many skills can be developed and then the computer-based communication is being improved.  CALL was responsible to have created CMCL as a successor. It’s said to have been at least its extension.  Thorne and Payne conclude that socio-personal CMC started to develop with all the interaction caused by the development of the communication.

1.2 The road travelled: a broad view  Warschauer (1995) outlined the CMCL with his practitioner book.  Learners could: – communicate with native speakers; – have one-to-one conversation; – One-to-many or even many-to-many group conversation.  Warschauer and Kern’s questioned if the use of network-based language teaching lead to better language learning.  CMCL needs to get specific practices of use (task types, process description discourse and others).

1.3 What the meta-literature reveals about practice and research:  CMCL must be considered a category.  Authors neglected seen it as a category then it caused the insufficient problematisation of CMCL in this area of teaching.  Jung: “…we are using the internet as an empty transport medium like the telephone…”.

1.4 Practitioner studies as a reflection of practices of use  Some authors made a deep study analyzing the learners actions. Liu et al.’s corpus and Hassan et al.’s corpus show us the way some learners used the CMCL. See table 1.3 and 1.4 below

 Kern’s view of US based CMCL for ten years has shown that the result of CMCL – based learning is dependent on lots of social, logistical and mainly pedagogical factors. 1.5 A new content area  Kern (2006) comes out with a development of another area: interculturalism => theory – building activity such as: connectivity non necessarily makes intercultural communication; there are cultural differences in the interaction styles; students must see the impact of cultural differences; research should be carried out to check communicative genre; success depends on interpersonal response; cultural misunderstandings from pen-pals can cause failure and low interaction.

1.6 The quality of CMCL research  CMCL research is called to have a more quantitative form.  Levy (2000) wrote a long article defending the descriptivism;  Hubbard (2005) presents critics about the researchers using small numbers of untrained learners to make some conclusions;  Hassan et al. says that studies must analyze the result of language learning intervention associated with another intervention;  Liu et al. stated that “ the use of well established measures with clear reliability and validity is the least point of start.  Levy added that “ descriptive work is necessary in all CALL research, otherwise it becomes empty.

Summary  CMCL research has focused on questions on conversation and discourse, learner participation and collaboration.  Oral skills is still of great interest.  Older research is being carried out to see the facilitation of oral ability.  Newer research is also happening to check how real speech happens in synchronous voice-over-Internet environments.