Statement of purpose
In applied linguistics, there is a major shift in its approaches and techniques. It’s not only the field related to language and its usage but along with this, it has become a major field of information technology (Baker,P. 1994).Language teaching is not merely confined to classroom activities or poster presentations but now it has spread over to language laboratories and World Wide Web of linguistics as well. When a student sits in a classroom or lecture hall, she is actually in a multimedia environment. There are many language soft ware’s available in market for different integrative activities. In some countries IT has become the most important part of their curriculum. This paper shows that the use of IT and multimedia in language teaching is gaining recognition. Techniques are being used for recording authentic academic lectures with a camcorder and then converting the recordings to videotapes. Along with this, the use of computer while planning lassons is now the common practice around the world. The approach I would like to discuss here offers students individualized instruction and the opportunity to develop these practices in a more private setting and on their own. Information technology can be used to assist ESL students in listening to and watching lectures and to refine their note-taking skills. Through this way, we promote interactive English language teaching through IT.
Finally, the article urges that bilingual communicative language teaching softwares would be useful for bilingual teachers in order to facilitate simulations not only in classroom but at home or language laboratories as well.
Main stakeholders and their roles
This paper is aimed at teachers of English as a foreign or second language, who wish to incorporate information technology into their current practices. English language teachers are the primary stakeholders. They can teach language perfectly without the use of computer but these tools do make life easier. IT tools can open up whole new vistas within the teaching practices. The secondary stakeholders are academic administrator, who formulates these necessities in academic institution. The use of multimedia is very frequent but in language institutes but the use of language laboratory is not very common, because this hardware fixing is quite expensive. With the help of computer and IT, these stakeholders can easily utilize these tools in language teaching.
Detailed use of this project:
Incorporating IT into teaching practice can bring many concrete benefits. We can illustrate this with the help of this case study:
- Case study 1 – Maria (Teaching English with Information Technology, pg 9, 2005)
Maria is a Brazilian teacher of English in a small town in the interior of Brazil. Her teenage students have never met a native speaker of English. Maria has never been to an English speaking country and feels insecure about her own English, as well as being aware that she is not up-to-date with recent methodological development. The textbooks she is told to use are out-to-date and not relevant to the students’ lives.
Information technology can help her alleviate these problems. Using the internet, she can enable her students to interact with American teenagers using text chat. She can keep up-to-date with development in ELT through reading online journals, visiting the websites of professionals’ organizations such as TESOL or IATEFL, and attending online conferences. The internet support and empowers Maria in her own teaching. Best of all, none of the online resources described above require a particularly powerful computer or fast internet connection
To conclude, IT can empower teacher and improve language teaching for the following reasons:
- It provides access to up-to-date material on every imaginable topic
- It makes different things and material easy transferring and make information very simple, potentially allowing a user to spend classroom time more meaningfully and efficiently.
- It can help you create exercises and materials that are easily reusable, thereby saving you time in the long run.
- It renders geographical distance less significant.
- It allows non-native speakers to interact with native speakers.
A number of people these days see IT as something which complements exclusive teaching, instead of replacing it. But apart from this internet or e-learning, a multimedia approach is becoming more promising for language teachers. Important features of multimedia instruction are recycling, individual monitoring, and record keeping. Another important feature of IT is interactivity (Raphan, D. 1996).students are required to react and interact with the material in ways that enhance their comprehension of the lecture. In the classroom students do not usually have the opportunity to do this. Students who have access to language softwares often report that they enjoyed it because it reduced their anxiety.
Phonological and communicative software can be design by keeping in mind the region. The major population around the world is bilingual. People are exposed to more than two languages, due to the influence of their first language i.e. mother tongue, their English language is not native like. In order to teach them English language it is very important to keep sound systems of both the languages at a distance. With the help of lexicon speaking dictionaries and communicative facilitating soft wares we can make their speech more native like.
Through language teaching softwares and multimedia system we can evaluate how students react to the multimedia environment and language softwares, and then we can also determine whether they find the system helpful and which aspect of the system could be improved to meet their needs. This paper suggest that language teaching softwares helps to improve language of students as well as gives them a chance to acquire native like competence ,because they are directly interacting with the native speakers of the English language.
References
David, G.S & Eric, B. (2005). ‘Teaching English with Information Technology’. London: Modern English.
Baker , P. (1996) ‘ If This Was On The Computer We Could Hear The Lion Go Roar’-Information And Communication Technology Early Years Education, In L. Abbott & H. Moylett (Eds) Early Education Transformed, New Millennium Series. London: Falmer press.
Raphan, D. (1996). ‘Different Approaches to Teaching Skills’. TESOL Journal, V6 N2 P24-28