ALMUDENA FERNÁNDEZ FONTECHA

Universidad de La Rioja

The design of ICT materials for L2 teaching: State of the art

Lingüística Aplicada

The last years have witnessed a growing interest in the implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within language education in the European context. Thus, the field of L2 teaching has benefited from the increasing number of initiatives or actions prompted by small/large-scale projects on the integration of new technologies in the L2 classroom. This work intends to cater for the ICT materials devised for L2 teaching as they are the tangible results of these projects. The scope of the research is narrowed to multimedia materials (I) developed in the European context and specifically in Spain since the year 2000 (to refine the scope of the survey only materials banks, databases, or resource centres of European, National (Spain), and Regional (Spanish Autonomous Communities) Official Institutions are considered); (II) implementing a Task-based Language Teaching approach (inquiry-oriented or problem-solving tasks, e.g. webquests or treasure hunts, are taken into account over other types of activities); (III) that may integrate a Content and Language Integrated Learning framework; (IV) addressing Spanish Secondary (2nd cycle of ESO or Baccalaureate) learners of English as a foreign language; (V) that may be published on the Internet through a website; and (VI) in whose design teachers had some kind of role, either by working individually or in collaboration with other teachers and/or experts. Among the results of this investigation, we stress the fact that, with some exceptions, the materials listed above do not harness the computer and Internet’s potential at all, i.e. they are limited to imitating paper on a computer screen. In addition, it is observed a striking absence of an adequate integration of methodological principles in the design of these materials. Generally, this type of materials does not draw insights from disciplines such as foreign language pedagogy, contemporary foreign language theory, cognitive learning theory, human and computer interaction, or instructional design theory. Multimedia materials design is usually done independently from research results obtained in these fields. These results lead us to propose a materials-design framework where the main pedagogic principles of the following foreign language teaching methods, i.e. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), Focus on Form (FonF), and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) are complementary and can be included, and consistently applied, in the design of an original multimedia material for Spanish secondary learners of English as a foreign language.



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