Task-based language teaching (TBLT) offers a model for functional language proficiency training; it responds to learners’ precisely specified communicative needs and offers a potential to harmonize the way languages are taught with findings of SLA research. TBLT covers such methodological principles as using tasks as units of analysis, promoting learning by doing, elaboration of input and promoting collaborative learning. Task-based activities are found to promote interaction, and the language of the participants is reported to be typical of negotiation for meaning (Doughty and Long 2003, González-Lloret 2003).

Numerous studies suggest that computerized media and a multimedia environment can be helpful for learning foreign language vocabulary. However, the materials in the studies have mainly been commercial or teacher-produced. Student authoring in computer-based material design for foreign language learning has been shown to enhance vocabulary learning (Nikolova 2003). It has been asserted that on-line debate is an excellent medium for generating social construction of knowledge (Fujike 2004).

CALL claims to promote learner autonomy, although the role of the teacher is not inconsequential. A considerable amount of evidence supports the view that cooperative learning, including project-oriented learning, can lead to the enhanced learner autonomy. The teacher’s new role in the emergence of new forms of literacy acknowledges, first of all, that the institutional education should, in the curricula, better prepare the students for life outside of school. Further, such a role requires the teachers to achieve a new conceptualization of teaching and pedagogical innovation from a sociocultural perspective. Constructivist/socioconstructivist approaches to learning have been proposed as particularly conducive to more progressive uses of computer technologies (Jones 2001, Toyoda 2001, Parks et al. 2003).

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