Innovation in Language Learning

The exponential development of new information and communication technologies has revolutionised various aspects of everyday life. The way in which people maintain contacts is not immune. These new tools make it possible to maintain contact with people anywhere on the planet, whatever their language, beliefs or culture. This situation has brought all these differences face to face and has had a negative impact on intercomprehension within this digital space. This inter-comprehension, even between speakers of the same language from different countries, is due to the fact that each social group remains attached to its own linguistic-cultural customs without being able to decipher or try to understand the customs of others. In the business world, large companies have overcome this stumbling block by relying on localisation (L10n) in their digital communications, the aim of which is to adapt their communicative content to the linguistic and cultural habits of their target audiences and markets. However, the education sector does not yet seem to have grasped the importance of localisation in terms of its model for language teaching. What localisation could bring to language teaching is essentially the different standard forms of the same language. Teaching a language in these different standard forms, such as French between France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, or Spanish between Spain and Latin American countries, would give the speaker of the language in question the possibility of communicating with speakers from other countries while overcoming pre-existing discrepancies. This paper attempts to demonstrate the importance of opting for a kind of ‘comparative language’ didactics by taking advantage of the achievements of localisation, through the analysis of a few localised websites.