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KEY AREAS FOR ICT APPLICATION IN MFL TEACHING AND LEARNING
There is no one best way to learn a foreign language nor a single optimal set of teaching materials. This is because learners will vary both in how they learn and what they need and want to learn. It follows therefore, that there is no single 'magic bullet' that can be offered by ICTs to support language learning for all pupils and across all ages (see the Futurelab Literature Review in Languages, Technology & Learning by Jim Milton for further discussion of this position).
However, looking at the current provision of language teaching, and at the future languages strategy, there are a number of key roles that ICTs have the potential to fulfil in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) teaching and learning:
- Increasing motivation to learn languages.
- Enabling language learning across institutions and outside formal educational contexts.
- Offering opportunities for meaningful practice of language in authentic contexts.
- Offering opportunities for maximal progress in language acquisition through responsive diagnostic and feedback systems.
- Providing innovative language engineering devices which provide just-in-time support in language use.
- Enabling information and resource sharing between MFL teachers.
These aspects of ICT respond to three key issues in MFL teaching: first, the need to ensure that learning MFLs is seen as relevant and enjoyable to learners; second, the need to offer more opportunities for learners to practice using MFLs; and third, the need to support language teachers, particularly at primary level, in rural areas or teachers working in less popular languages.
To expand on these points, ICTs can be seen to offer a number of features that are currently in demand from the language teaching and learning communities.
1. Motivation
ICTs, through games and other digital media, through offering 'real and relevant' opportunities for linking with real language learners (through the internet/video-conferencing), through providing access to relevant and engaging materials (through access to foreign language entertainment and information sources), can provide increased motivation for learners of all ages to acquire and use languages.
2. Learning across and outside institutions
Through video and e-mail links with schools in other countries, ICTs can offer real opportunities to use languages with native speakers; through personalised and mobile devices, and through home access to the internet, ICTs can offer learners the opportunity to practise languages outside the languages classroom.
3. Meaningful practise of language in context
Before the arrival of the internet, e-mail and video-conferencing, the only way of practising language in context was through expensive school visits or through the telephone. ICTs offer opportunities for practising language in context with real native speakers in all four skills areas (reading, writing, listening and speaking) in ways that would have been impossible before.
4. Effective practise and progress
Languages may be one of the only areas in which the Computer Assisted Learning Paradigm is still acknowledged as being of some merit, as the aspects of progressive language acquisition key to language learning can be practised through drill and test systems. These enable learners to practise languages in an environment free from embarrassment where they can work at their own pace. These environments also offer instant feedback on success, diagnostic testing of abilities and encourage learners to manage their own learning.
5. Language engineering is beginning to provide useful applications
Portable devices now can support dictionaries, pronunciation (speaking dictionaries), context-specific phrase books and so on. Professional translators use corpora and translation memories (a professional's equivalent of the vocab book). Machine translation, whilst not perfect, is becoming more sophisticated. How these tools influence the ways we go about using a foreign language and support our acquisition of mastery of that language need investigating. Mathematics has changed from using slide rules and log tables - should MFL change? These tools may increase confidence.
6. Information and resource-sharing between MFL teachers
The internet can function as a powerful tool for language teachers; by enabling them to create and share their own resources and models of good practice, by creating databanks of games and tests that can be used by other teachers, and by offering lists of MFL resources in target languages that can be shared. Examples of this sort of activity in practice can be found particularly at the Sir Bernard Lovell School Online MFL & ICT resource centre, at Shirelands Languages College and at the CILT website.
To achieve all of the above activities without access to ICTs is not only difficult, but highly costly, and has, historically, tended to exclude all but children culturally and socially predispositioned towards language learning.
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