Tools and methods supporting collaborative learning for foreign language acquisition in online contexts 

It is argued that current Web affordances offer educators the possibility of doing almost everything that has been done in the classroom so far online “with perhaps the exception of the rich face- to- face interaction of the classroom” (Anderson, 2004). But it is precisely how to create and maintain a sense of community between people which has been the subject of much study by online educators, as the link between learning and social presence has become clear (Richardson & Swan, 2003). It is thought that the potential of modern interactive web tools can be harnessed to create the collaborative learning environments that support deep learning according to social constructivist learning theories. In this review we wish to investigate the ways in which this is happening in foreign language teaching today.

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