This digest examines ways in which the foreign language laboratory can serve to support communicative approaches to language instruction by becoming interactive. Although, in one sense, this can be achieved through the acquisition of interactive hardware, this paper focuses on the pedagogical approaches to language lab use that create interaction by allowing students to use the language when their attention is focused on conveying and receiving authentic messages. These approaches involve task-based activities, which require the student to use the language being studied even though the task itself is not focused on the language. Task-based activities involve making use of the unique features of the language lab to create a learning environment that cannot be recreated in the regular classroom. (VWL)