Abstract:
With technological advances and infrastructure developments in this era, multimedia, including Internet technology, has been widely used in language teaching and learning. In the field of second/foreign language education, despite “the seemingly formidable task of academic writing” (Wei, Chen, and Adawu 2014, 60), recent years have witnessed the impact of computers as well as other digital devices on second/foreign language learners’ writing development. On the one hand, multimedia tools bring great convenience to language learners in many aspects, and this means that learners can do automatic spelling and grammar checks, edit and revise their texts and search for online resources, among many other tasks. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of the multimedia contexts to which learners have access also leads to increasingly heavy cognitive load in their efforts to deal with multitudes of interactions in order to learn effectively. Such situations require that learners in this era be fully ready for meeting these challenges.