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Utilizing Digital technology and social media in language classes

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This blog post was compiled by Vanna Motta and Helga Eckart, Cardiff University (LEARN Building).

Context

The event was well attended by the language tutors of several institutions both in the South Wales region, South East region  and from abroad (two delegates from the university of Calabria, and one from Washington University). The majority of the delegates are native speakers of the language they teach working in a British cultural context.

The languages taught by the delegates present at the workshop varied from Chinese, to German, to French, to Italian and Spanish.

Context: Cardiff University is engaged at the moment in restructuring the university language departments in order to create a Modern Foreign Language School which will form a ‘hub’ where foreign languages will be taught at all levels. Students  from the local communities, secondary schools, university undergraduates, and postgraduates will be actively encouraged to participate in the language teaching and learning activities the new School will engage in. We, the organisers of the event, are both senior members of the two leading language departments of Cardiff university: Ms Helga Eckart is a Senior Lecturer in LEARN (Lifelong Learning Centre) with a long experience of teaching German in the local community and UG level, and Dr Vanna Motta is a Senior Lecturer in Europ (School of European Studies, translation and Politics), with a long experience of teaching Italian both at UG and PG level. We both make use of IT in our teaching, in particular Learning central, the virtual platform of Cardiff university, Skype (we set up a Skype Tandem partnership with Parma University in Italy in 2014) and we encourage students to make use of on line links and material to improve oral skills.

Overview

The event included presentations by two speakers in the morning, Liz Parcell and Nebojsa Radic, followed by 2 workshop in the afternoon, run by 3 speakers (Esther Barett joined Liz Purcell to organise Social Media activities in the afternoon). The event provided the delegates with the opportunity to reflect, evaluate and discuss teaching practises already in place in their institutions. The work done throughout the day proved to be extremely useful to help and create confidence in all the language tutors when using material on line. The speakers indicated several links and online resources that can be easily accessed and used in the classroom.

Links to work being carried out in the sector

The Language centre of Cambridge University has a lot of material on line for a host of languages. All the material can be accessed by teaching institutions and the public. They provide material that has already been tested by their own institution, and are constantly adding extra resources.

https://raven.cam.ac.uk/auth/authenticate.html?ver=1&url=http%3a%2f%2flconline.langcen.cam.ac.uk%2f&date=20140328T1230

http://www.langcen.cam.ac.uk/resources/resources.php?c=2

Plans to develop work in this area

We have already discussed with Ms Liz Purcell and  the possibility of ‘training’ our Cardiff colleagues in the use of digital technology in the language classes through an on-line lunchtime course to be provided by Ms Purcell and  possibly to be done in the new academic session in September. The enthusiasm of the Cardiff colleagues who came to the workshop has convinced us that this would be well accepted in our scholarly community.

We felt that there is a lot of scope in using IT and social media in particular to promote language teaching and to make language learning more interesting, more complete and more satisfactory for students. We feel the use of technology in language teaching and learning needs to be explored further.

To this end, we also want to mention that a new education language  technologist has just been appointed  to work in the new School of Modern Languages whose role it is to encourage and train staff in the use and the development of blended learning, social media, etc.

Question

How can social media help in learning modern foreign languages?


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