This article starts from the standard conceptualization of linguistic competence as being composed of four related memories of comparable relevance: reading, listening, writing and speaking. It is argued that there is a considerable imbalance between the application of technology to the former two and the others. A system called COPPER is presented, which addresses this problem by helping students to improve their linguistic production combining individual and collaborative activities in a constructivist methodology with a way to overcome technological language analysis difficulties. The knowledge models used in COPPER have been developed from the authors’ previous work, undertaken to solve some of the problems of linguistic models of student competence. Methodologically, the system ‘empowers’ students in that it leads to shared understanding, which reinforces learning. The system is adaptive in the sense that group formation is dynamic and based upon the nature of the tasks to be performed and the features of the student model.