Recent innovations in technology allow foreign language learners and their instructors to interact both inside and beyond the classroom using a variety of communicative tools. As a consequence, the classroom has been transformed into an extended learning environment which has had a profound effect on both student and teacher roles. However, the theoretical and pedagogical issues emerging from these new practices have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In an ongoing collaborative research project, we seek to gain greater insights into the benefits of specific computer-mediated communication (CMC) activities and to examine the relationship between in-class, online, and out-of-class learning. In this paper, we propose the concept of spiraled interaction-the dynamic interplay of in-class activities that in part focus on meaning and focus on form and online collaborations that have as their primary goal student-constructed representations of knowledge. Our investigation initiates a general framework that combines technology-mediated pedagogy with different learning objectives at various levels of competency.
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