(1792) APPLIED LANGUAGE LEARNING FOR DIGITAL NATIVES

摘要

Today's students have a world of information available to them via their mobile phones. No longer dothey need to spend hours looking through the library and then have to remember the facts theydiscover. Why remember if you can bookmark?.There are still those who feel that this change is somehow bad;;as if there were something intrinsicallygood in spending an evening looking for rather than thinking about information. It is certainly arguablethat this change has left us free to use our brains for more important things: now that my languagelearners compose email, they can worry less about where to put the addresses and more about whatthey are actually saying. Should we not be preparing our students for the world in which they reallylive?The fact is that unless we at least acknowledge the existence of technology, we run the risk of ourlanguage lessons seeming out of touch and irrelevant. In this paper we will look at the reasons why weshould embrace technology and some of the tools available to us. It will be also be demonstated at theheart of this there are some surprisingly 'old-fashioned' educational values based on some very soundpedagogic principles and findings with regards to brain science.After a brief decription of the context and scope of this paper in which some key educational issuesrelated to the role of technology in the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom in the 21stcentury will be discussed, 8 main points will be explored and covered with examples that can beapplied in ELT Methodology:1. Vision trumps all other senses2. Students need multisensory input3. Students want instant access to information4. Students expect immediate feedback5. Students want interactivity6. Students enjoy working in groups and they are competitive7. Students have short attention spans8. Students need digital resources that support autonomous learning & self-access