Innovation in Language Learning

Seemingly, most language educators have heretofore shown a receptive attitude for the introduction of ICT in their teaching since this is a motivation booster for students of all levels and, above all, because it prevents them from sticking to the textbook. For sure, this revamped style of teaching and learning foreign languages have been garnered from educationist’s invaluable experience that paves the way for highlighting a more pragmatic use of the foreign language. We have made great strides toward the reinvention of the language teaching praxis by adding a sense of realism to whatever happens in the classroom. Learners themselves demand input which can be transformed into meaningful language chunks and that is liable to be utilized in real contexts.

However, oftentimes would-be teachers pay just lip service to new approaches or methodologies but when it comes to actual teaching they feel safer with a traditional laden perspective. In order to align instruction and practice, we designed a training course for teacher trainees where ICT and Task Based Language Learning Approach (TBLL) merged together. This embryo plan was brought to fruition in the form of a European funded project entitled Pan European Task Activities for Language Learning (PETALL) (reference number 530863-LLP-2012-NL-KA2-KA2MP). For that, a collaborative network was established among the ten participating countries, namely, Portugal, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain. (See http://petallproject.eu/petall/index.php/en/ for more information).

In this paper we will examine the structure, contents and delivery of the national training course held in Spain. Thus, this is geared towards the development of strategies to provide teachers with the necessary tools to include ICT-based tasks in their teaching activities. Contents shift from the theoretical tenets of TBLL to the practical empowerment of attendees so that they get a clearer idea of how this approach can be part of their future lessons (module I Definition of concepts, 6 hours). In this sense, participants were taught first how to do the task, then we did the task together, and finally we transferred the leading role and they were requested to do the task on their own (I do, we do, you do) (module II Designing and assessing quality ICT-based tasks, 9 hours; and module III Creation of tasks and assessment, 9 hours). At the end, would-be teachers, who kindly pinpointed areas for the betterment of the original plan, gave us feedback that served as fodder for further research input.