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CMC has been extensively researched from various disciplinary and methodological perspectives. This form of communication, with a broad scope of processes and tool-use, facilitates information design and delivery, and human-human and human-machine interactions with structural, cognitive and sociocognitive implications. It has been more than ten years since the online CMC Magazine started a debatable question of “what is CMC?” in 1997. Various definitions have been offered from a diversity of perspectives. CMC, the term first being coined by Hiltz and Turoff (1978), was originally described as “the process by which people create, exchange, and perceive information using networked telecommunications systems that facilitate encoding, transmitting, and decoding messages” (December, 1996). This rather technical-oriented definition has been endorsed by a number of researchers. Luppicini (2007), for example, defines CMC as “communications, mediated by interconnected computers, between individuals or groups separated in space and/or time” (p. 142). Similarly, according to Herring (2001) and Warschauer (1999), CMC is openly delineated as communication taking place between human beings via the instrumentality of computers. Technically, CMC is widely known as a transmission and reception of messages using computers as input, storage, output, and routing devices.

However, just like the fast-changing CMC technologies themselves, the definition of CMC is not fixed. But rather, there has been an evolution from focus on tool or medium to emphasis on process or interaction between human. A human-oriented description of CMC can be perceived as any form of organised computer-supported interaction between people; or as an environment in which users interact with other users over the network (D. E. Murray, 2000; Paramskas, 1999). In other words, CMC is a generic term that embodies all forms of communication between individuals and among groups via networked computers. Another more abstract definition claims that CMC “means different things to different people, which is both its strength and the source of some of the problems arising in the research literature” (P. J. Murray, 1997, p. 1). In reference to language learning, “CMC allows language learners with network access to communicate with other learners or speakers of the target language” (Kern & Warschauer, 2000, pp. 11-12).

Many a researcher has recently suggested the application of SCT as a theoretical framework into the study of CMC (Chapelle, 2001; Kern & Warschauer, 2000). Looking from the sociocultural perspective, "CMC is not just a tool. It is at once technology, medium, and engine of social interactions. It not only structures social relations, it is the space within which the relations occur and the tool that individuals use to enter that space” (Jones, 1995, p. 16).

In quite a few circumstances the uniqueness of CMC mirrors and contributes to recent changes in society and developments in educational theories (Romiszowski & Mason, 2004). Regarding the contextual setting, CMC is “more than the context within which social relations occur… It is commented on and imaginatively constructed by symbolic processes initiated and maintained by individuals and groups” (Jones, 1995, p. 16).

Accordingly, as a pedagogical shift has moved language educators from cognitive assumptions about knowledge and learning as brain-local phenomenon to contextual, collaborative, and sociocultural approaches to language development and activity (Kern & Warschauer, 2000), CMC - like all other human creations - should be considered as cultural tools possessing particular interactional and relational associations, expectations, and preferred uses (Thorne, 2008a). In other words, CMC with its own social and cultural features has various implications, meanings and uses in different communities.

In general, CMC can be viewed both as mediational tools and as a communication process. When viewed as tools, CMC is examined from technological aspects that provide the medium for communication. Other aspects are revealed when CMC is perceived as a communication process, which includes the message, the sender and the receiver. It is therefore human factors with their sociocultural and historical background that play significant roles during the interaction process.

               Source: Nguyen, L. V. (2008). Computer mediated communication and foreign language education: Pedagogical features. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 5(12), 23-44.