Innovation in Language Learning

Over the years, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has provided teachers with various tools to be used in the educational process, thus leading to major changes in the learning and teaching methods. Lately, the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has brought new insights into the use of various devices, such as computers, mobile devices, wearable sensors, etc. in educational settings. Taking into account that mobile devices (i.e. smartphones, tablets, laptops) have become near-ubiquitous, the education stakeholders have noticed the potential of these mobile devices for improving teaching and learning. For example, (Sharples et al., 2005) argue that “there is a need to re-conceptualize learning for the mobile age, to recognize the essential role of mobility and communication in the process of learning”. Nowadays, there are various free, readily available tools for using mobile devices in the education field, some of them being geared towards language learning. In order to better understand the way language learning classes could benefit from the use of mobile technology, we focus on providing an overview of the mobile technology, its use and advantages for the language learning environments. However, at the same time, the continuous development of technology poses complex challenges for teachers, some of them being revealed in this presentation. We believe that the findings highlighted in this presentation can have important implications both for foreign language teachers as well as for teacher trainers, for the improvement of the teaching process.

Keywords: Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile technology/applications.

References:
[1] Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula (2005), Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning, Proceedings of MLearn 2005 Conference, 25–28 October, Cape Town, South Africa, 2005