Computers in foreign language teaching

 When people think of teaching English by using computers, most of them immediately imagine sophisticated language laboratories, ear, audio-visual equipment, specific software and things like that. I have never been interested in this. I started getting interested in computers when their role in teaching changed. In the history of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) the computer has had many roles, following the technological and methodological transformations of these last decades.

  60's - 70's

In the 1960s and 1970s the computer was used as a tutor, a repeating exercise dispenser, a "machine that knows the right answer", an indefatigable and all-knowing tool, able to present exercises and explanations again and again for an endless number of times, then immediately evaluate the answers and finally correct the errors. When using the computer as a teaching machine the purpose was to make sure that the learners acquired the language structures according to the behaviourist model of the audiolingual method, which was predominant in that period in foreign language teaching. 

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80's

In the 1980s the communicative approach became predominant in foreign language teaching, and at the same time microcomputers supplanted mainframe computers in Electronics. CALL became communicative. The assumption was that: if language is communication, then students have to be active, make choices, and produce language in communicative contexts rather than manipulate pre-packed pieces of language to be repeated and memorised. They had to be given the possibility to interact with the machine, which therefore became flexible with respect to a variety of possible reactions and responses. The computer assumed the role of both a tutor and a tool, a device which guided the students but at the same time gave them greater possibilities of choice, control, interaction. The purpose was to improve the students’ linguistic-communicative mastery. The types of software used were not only those specifically designed for teaching, but also included word processors, dictionaries, and language games used with a didactic aim.

At this stage the computer had not introduced any significant innovations into teaching. What was new was the greater effectiveness and productivity of procedures, techniques, activities and exercises, normally presented by the teacher, that had become much faster, and  more effective and profitable. Yet, the machine was a novelty  in itself, a change in the routines of school life and so an incentive to the students' motivation. But nothing more: the computer sometimes replaced the teacher, made some processes faster, and represented a variation in the ordinary course of the lessons. These changes were hardly significant when faced with the complex of skills, strategies, and competencies that are required to stimulate and enhance the language learning process.  

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90's

Two innovations in technology, multimedia computer and the Internet, completely changed the role of the computer, by making it a precious ally of foreign language teachers, above all the teachers of English , the language of online communication. The computer became a powerful means of  communication, a tool used to find remote and distributed information about any topic, to publish and diffuse the work produced by everyone, to send and receive messages in any form - written texts, pictures, sounds, videos.

In a few words, at school, English plus the Internet could mean real communication between the class and the world, no more only the realism simulated in classroom activities such as roleplays, “Let’s say you are.... and you are....”.

With online communication used at school everything could become real, even if virtual: the protagonists of the communicative act, the different typologies of media through which the messages are transmitted, the possibility to integrate the language skills in all the possible combinations (reading and writing, listening and writing, listening and speaking, etc.), the possibility to interact with people, organizations, associations, companies. The whole world was on hand through a medium that provided a return, a continuous feedback, the possibility to choose one’s own path, stimuli and answers/responses to individual or group questions/demands. An environment where it was possible to ask questions and receive answers. Aren’t these the features of the communicative exchanges we try to reproduce in our lessons? “Choice, information gap, feedback”, these are the characteristics of the communicative acts we hardly succeed in reproducing in our simulations at school when we teach a foreign language. Yet an essential element has been always missing in our simulations: the necessity of communicating by using a code different from the natural one, an element that is the true motivation of communication, which raises from the need to communicate. The Internet, with all its potentials, could offer a real environment, even if virtual, where it was possible to make this need to communicate true by using a language that is not our mother tongue. 

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Considerations about computers and teachers

This is what I have been experimenting for some years with my classes, and it is the only reason why I have learnt something about computers.

But who are the teachers that are able to recognise and exploit these potentials connected to the possibilities of creating an environment that allows to facilitate and multiply the occasions of real communication?

Even in this case, if we analyse better, the use of computers in itself does not bring any didactic innovation; “simply” it optimises techniques and procedures that could be fulfilled as well without any technological support. It speeds the paths, make the projects’ realisation easier, provides a greater amount of resources, shortens distances, favours the collaborative work inside and outside the class. True. But the point is always the same: the teachers who decide to exploit the potentials of the computer as a means of communication introduce an enhancement in the effectiveness of their work, not because they use new devices, but because they have previously made the choice of identifying communication through the foreign language as their final aim, and they have recognised the construction of knowledge as a collaborative process. They “simply” consider the computer  the ideal tool to accomplish that. It is always a question of methodological choice, I daresay a philosophical choice. The choice of the instruments is only a consequence and depends on the time we live in.

Therefore the computer in teaching is never an innovation in itself, except for the initial element of novelty. Teachers may use the computer and at the same time practise an absolutely traditional method, not innovative at all (translation with the help of the computer, grammar exercises on the computer, typing texts and spelling correction by the computer, a course on CDROM lessons after lessons just like the ones are usually held in class simply supported by a textbook, cassettes or videocassettes, etc.). Results can be expected, certainly, because everything will be faster, more effective, and more productive, thanks to the indefatigability and capacities of the machine, but there will be no change in the attitude of our students towards the subject we teach, which is not a content, but a different code to interpret the reality around us; nor the students will acquire awareness of the real potentials of the machines they are using. The result will be the acquisition of another “scholastic” knowledge, a double one this time, both of language and computer, with all the negative connotation that the adjective “scholastic” has got.

On the other hand, some teachers may introduce the use of the computer from time to time and think that, just for doing that, they have updated their way of teaching. Sometimes they allow the students to go to the multimedia lab to surf the Web; they start an email activity with other schools and then the students go on by themselves (if they like), because the teachers do not have enough time to look after it, as they have more important things to do from the syllabus point of view. They may decide to create some hypermedia just thinking that it is something that can be done only putting the students in front of a computer, and probably they never succeed in finishing one because the modern devices are so difficult to use and, in the end, they are not Information Technology teachers. It becomes only a question of using computers because it is so modern and students like them so much. All this without reconsidering their own way of teaching at all, and without rebuilding the curriculum around it. Simply a surplus to propose when the students (and the teacher) are tired of the serious things traditionally inserted in the annual plan. In this case the new technologies are considered as a sort of fun-fair to entertain students and teachers in the breaks between a serious work and another.

This is a very negative behaviour, since from one hand it does not change the attitude of the students towards the foreign language, from the other hand it presents the computer as an exclusively ludic instrument and not as a tool which allows to create and publish original productions, develop creativity, learn, organise information and materials, systematise paths, study and communicate.

In conclusion, introducing the computer in teaching is never a revolution in itself; innovative and coherent must be the methodology and the approach inside which we choose to work, as "….knowingly or not, every teacher practises a theory, or theories about how children and adults learn." (Willis J W, Stephens E C & Matthew K I (1996) Technology, Reading, and Language Arts, Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, Massachusetts, p 8).

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