The potential of ICTs in language education

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 456.

Skim the text and tell the importance of ICTs in language education

READING

Answer the questions

1. What does the author emphasize in this study?

2. What the main areas should training of teachers focus on of this study? 3. What do you think about the development of distance learning and other forms of education and training?

ICTs can expand access to language programmes and improve the quality of teaching and learning in general. The World Wide Web expands the classroom context and provides access to current, up-to-date materials from the country or countries of the target language, offering learners and teachers a plethora of materials in different modes, bringing the foreign culture and language to life and making it more tangible. In environments where teaching staff are not able to fulfill all requirements of the curriculum with regard to the skills and knowledge required, ready-made, high quality audio-visual and other programmes may provide sufficient backupfor them to offer appropriate courses without having to engage in time-consuming and expensive (re)training.

The positive affordances of ICTs in FLT/FLL have been recognized in most educational contexts; the technology and materials are available, but ongoing training is essential if we are to reap the benefits of the rich learning environment, which ICTs offer for foreign language learning. As training and education become increasingly time and place independent, new models must be found to integrate the new media into a principled approach to teaching and learning, which enriches and supplements traditional materials and well-tried delivery systems in existing institutions. The different contributions in this study show some of the potential of the new technologies for language learning and language teaching. They also warn us of being over-optimistic. Above all, they recommend careful analysis of specific needs for different educational contexts before deploying the media, and advocateconscientiousplanning at all stages of the introduction and implementation of new programs and programmes