| The emergence of the Internet as a pedagogical tool has led Second Language teachers and learners from Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) to a new age of Internet-Assisted Language Learning (IALL). Previous work by Robert Di Pietro (1987) and Patricia Dyer (1983) suggested that Strategic Interaction (SI) had further potential for use as a CAI activity. The accessibility of the Internet led Colburn (1998) to propose that SI could be adapted for use as an IALL-based activity. This work traces the development of both IALL and SI to the development of Strategic Interaction OnLine (SIOL), a technique for presenting scenario activities on the Internet. The chapters that follow describe the design, implementation, and results of a study which compared three groups of students enrolled in a third-semester French course at the University of Delaware. Students in each group participated in one of three types of scenario activities: traditional, classroom-based SI, SIOL, and a hybrid activity which brought SI and SIOL together in the classroom. The study used a holistic scoring system based on Canale and Swain's (1980) components of communicative competence to measure improvement. Comparison within and among trial sections revealed that students generally made progress in each of the three types of scenarios; however, students in the SIOL section made small improvements relative to the other two trial groups. This can be explained by the fact that only the SIOL section planned and performed their scenarios completely online. Based on the qualitative and quantitative results, a number of suggestions for improving the study and corollaries for further research are introduced. |
