On the other hand, many educators believe that Krashen's model goes too far and that language students do have to perform some learning tasks if the appropriate balance between fluency and accuracy is to be achieved. They would argue, then, that CALL drill and practice work serves a valuable function, since its use permits teachers to focus on developing other communicative skills during class time.

The question of who controls the student's learning environment ought not to be a major concern at this stage, since applications can be programmed to permit full or restricted movement through different sections or branches. What is critical, however, is that software that is developed for tutorial activity reinforce the use of the target language throughout and utilize vocabulary and situations which are natural and life-like.

Where distance learning CALL applications are concerned, there is room for both regular drill and practice tutorials and for communicative simulations. The truth is that with the separation of the learner and the teacher, drill and practice CALL does not duplicate classroom activities in the case of distance learning. For the home-study student, drill and practice normally means doing an exercise and then either waiting a long time to have it corrected or checking an answer key. In contrast, computer-assisted exercises are both interactive and communicative, in that they can analyze a student's response immediately, acknowledge the right answer, and, if the student is incorrect, provide either advice, the right answer, or an explanation of the error. This opportunity for immediate formative evaluation constitutes one of the primary strengths of CALL, a strength which ought to be all the more attractive to distance educators who are constantly searching for new ways of providing students with timely feedback.

This type of CALL could represent a major step forward in serving the needs of the distant learner in disciplines such as second language learning where drills and practice can serve an important role. Fortunately, there is considerable standardization in curriculum at the beginner and intermediate levels, even if the approaches and the methodologies vary considerably, and each institution need not embark on a software development program in order to make CALL drills and practice available to its students. For reasons both of accessibility and suitability as a medium, CALL software will in the foreseeable future remain an optional, complementary component of the distance delivered language course, and course designers should be able to purchase appropriate software or at the very most develop their own programs from a template.

This is less true in the case of other software which relies not only on the availability of a microcomputer but also of peripheral equipment. Given our earlier discussion of hardware, we will limit ourselves to possible CALL applications of computer-controlled random-access cassette recorders since this medium is one which several distance educational institutions (at least those that provide for student access to microcomputers) ought to be in a position to benefit from.