Second Language Acquisition and Technology: A Review of the Research [Electronic Version]. CAL Digest, from http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0311leloup.html

Foreign language (FL) teachers have always been ahead of the curve in integrating technology in FL instruction and learning, seeing the benefits of technology even without an extant research database to confirm their judgment. The number of computer ap-plications, communications technologies, and sheer volume of of-ferings on the Internet has grown at an amazing rate over the past 15 years, and many FL educators, heeding instinct, common sense, and anecdotal information, have embraced these new technologies as useful instructional tools. There is, however, a small but increas-ingly vocal cadre of second language acquisition (SLA) researchers who question whether the use of new technologies in language instruction furthers second language acquisition (Chapelle, 1997; Cubillos, 1998; Ervin, 1993; Garrett, 1991). Researchers lament the lack of sufficient empirical evidence to support this general belief (Burston, 1996; Salaberry, 1996) and have attempted to collect such evidence through literature reviews and calls for principled an