Teaching with Technology

Based on my personal experience as a student of English as a second language (ESL), I would say that technology was not very helpful in my studying.  Some cassette tapes, CDs, and some English learning software such as Rosetta Stone were used in my English classes in high school and college.  These materials were viewed as employing cutting-edge technologies at that time, but I doubt that they provided much of an advantage in my learning English.  I am now a graduate student at GMU in a program for ESL teachers. Over the last several years, I have given a lot of thought on how to teach ESL effectively but given little or no thought to the role of technology in my own teaching.  I would guess that there are certain methods of teaching a second language that might be helped by the use of technologies.  For example, technology can be used to facilitate language teaching in a classroom that adopts the Audiolingual method, which focuses oral drilling of sentence and phrase patterns, or Suggestopedia, which relies on baroque largo music to create a relaxed state of receptiveness to second language learning.  But it has been shown that the learning outcomes produced by the Audiolingual method and Suggestopedia fall short of expectations, and these two methods are not employed in today’s language classroom.  So I conclude that technology has had only a small influence on ESL teaching and that the primary ingredients for effective teaching are talent, passion, and knowledge of the teacher.

However, the assigned readings for our course and our seminars have caused me to rethink my ideas on technology as it relates to language education.  If the information and communications technologies are inextricably intertwined with our daily life, as mentioned in class discussion, they must have influences on second language learning and teaching in some ways.  First, technology provides access to a variety of target language input, which is regarded as the driving force of second language acquisition.  A great number of resources in different languages are available on the internet, and learners can obtain access to authentic audio and/or visual materials. They can also contact native speakers of the target language through e-mail and online chat.  Second, if learners expose themselves to large amount of and great variety of language input via current technology, language learning and teaching is no longer restricted to linguistic aspects.  In my opinion, social and cultural aspects should be included as components of language education so that learners can prepare themselves for dealing with the social interactions via information and communication technologies that could be a critical source of input in the language learning process.  And third, practitioners of language teaching need to be knowledgeable about how technology can be used to enhance language education.  I chose Language Learning & Technology as my journal to explore because I found some articles that are related to what I mentioned above in this paragraph.

Language Learning & Technology is a refereed journal that focuses on issues related to language learning and language teaching, and how they are affected or enhanced by the use of technologies.  The firs issue was published in 1997.  The journal is currently published three times per year on the web.  The issues of the journal that most interest me are those that examine ESL learners’ communicative competence that allows them to engage actively in today’s participatory culture and effectiveness of technology applied to language learning.  The articles on my reading list include “The Development of E-mail Literacy: from Writing to Peers to Writing to Authority Figures,” “Collaborative E-mail Exchange for Teaching Secondary ESL,” “The Internet As a Global Discourse Environment,” “Computer Assisted Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition,” and “The Impact of Call Instruction on Classroom Computer Use.” I hope that these articles of my interests do not overlap with my peers who chose the same journal.

Joann