In the first instance, this technology allows students to develop listening comprehension skills in a superior manner to the methodologies currently used in distance education settings. Although this is considered to be a crucial step in language acquisition and argued by some to be so important that speech generation should be delayed until the learner has sufficiently well mastered it, distance educators for very practical reasons have had difficulty in developing this skill in their students. Some courses rely on television and radio, others on audio cassettes, but none of these media on its own is fully satisfactory since feedback is either not provided at all or is provided after such a delay that it must be practically worthless. Random-accessed cassette recorders, on the other hand, allow students to listen to prerecorded material (preferably natural, real-life situations) and for assistance to be provided through the microcomputer and the cassette recorder according to the needs of the individual student. This may take various forms: replaying the material at an identical or slower speed, breaking down the material into shorter utterances, providing assistance with vocabulary, formative testing, branching to easier or more difficult material, and so on. Even the formative testing of understanding can be provided either visually (by computer), orally (by cassette recorder), or in both ways (although the student's input will have to be entered via the keyboard). Such a system is both more comprehensive and easier to access technologically than were earlier comprehension-based exercises of the orally cued, multi-slot substitution type developed for PLATO IV.

The same hardware configuration allows for another learning activity which the separation of learner and teacher renders impractical: dictation. In this instance the microcomputer and cassette recorder are used in order to develop both listening and writing skills. Assistance and evaluation must also be incorporated so that students can benefit fully from the activity, for without interaction of this sort, one might just as well send distant learners a taped dictation and an answer sheet.

The current emphasis on developing communicative programs which engage the student in a conversation with the computer also has merit in the distance education environment. Much has been written on the prototype program, Eliza, and its various offshoots (see Kossuth, 1984; Underwood, 1984). Agor (1984) describes communicative software in which the student interacts not with a psychologist, as in Eliza's case, but with a supermarket, asking whether or not different products are available. It would seem that software of this kind (simulated telephone conversations, face-to-face dialogues in which one asks for directions, and so on), even though it is limited by the fact that the computer can only recognize that which it has been programmed to recognize, can be developed taking into account real life-like situations, thereby engaging the student in meaningful communication. It is, however, difficult to envisage ways in which these applications, or for that matter the adventure games which are now equally popular, are particularly appropriate to the distant learning environment.