it in foreign language teaching â comparing pedagogical options

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especially with beginners, this may lead to making them feel overwhelmed with inaccessible lexis). III. ILLUSTRATION OF THE PROPOSED APPROACH AND OPEN CONCLUSIONS In the concrete educational context of the author, the learners’ profile covers a trait that should be taken into consideration when the foreign language teacher designs and uses IT in the language class, viz. the fact that they are engineering students, possessing (advanced) computer skills – in the case of Computer Science ones. This is a fact that is influential in determining the approach to teaching using IT that the teacher has made. Together with their computer literacy level, other elements in the students’ profile to be considered are their level of language proficiency, the course of language type and main objectives, as well as the short- and mostly long-term needs of the learners. In general, we will make reference to ESP type of course that we teach in the Bucharest Polytechnic, discussing the concrete cases the author has been involved lately in: - English for Professional Communication (EPC) practical courses to first and second year students, at B1/B2 level, - English for Science and Technology (EST) practical courses to second year students of the Computer Science Faculty, at B2/C1 level, - Scientific and Technical Communication in English (STCE) course and applications to Master of Science students, at B2/C1 level, - Technical Russian practical course to first year students of the Transports Faculty, at A1/A2 level. It is obvious that the type of course and the level dictate some options in terms of the IT support used, but the principles underlying the options are more or less the same. It is used in order to create the kind of activities which should answer the specific needs of the students in terms of their learning process, which should have a clear purpose and be well integrated in the general course approach, in order to help the actors of the instruction process to be more successful in attaining the established goals. The teaching approach is of an eclectic type, with options that are, we hope, well justified from the pedagogical point of view. It is mostly of the communicative type, but other methods and means are accepted, if they can ensure success. In what follows, a selection of IT means used in each of these types of language courses is briefly presented, as an illustration of the points made above. Thus, for the practical courses of the ESP type, which take place in the multimedia laboratory, we use in combination the computer & videoprojector, the document camera and the students’ computers, which provides an array of possibilities of combining them, We use them at all the stages of the course, and for all the skills under focus. We frequently refer to online dictionaries of the Worldweb type and make use of resources from the Internet or CDs. For the STCE course, we combine the course theoretical presentation on PowerPoint slides, with providing the students with handouts, providing space for supplementary notes on the students’ pages, while the applications are solved with the help of computers in the lab. As far as the course of Russian is concerned, due to the fact that we start from the A1 level, which means we teach the beginner level, we combine the use of the IT means with a more regular use of the board – for handwriting tasks, especially during the first part of the course, as there are marked differences between the hand written Russian alphabet and the printed one, which the learners should be taught to make. It is of course not possible to illustrate in this section, not even briefly, the variety of combinations of IT means used at different stages of the courses in each case. It is the teacher who should take decisions in this respect, thus gradually developing the skill of selecting the most appropriate IT tool for each stage and objective of the lesson.
However, to illustrate precisely the point we are making here, namely that each teacher should develop an interest in using IT means in the language class in order to attain their goals more efficiently, we have chosen the simplest, apparently, tool that we constantly make use of in our classes – the Word document, for the following reasons: - it is one of the most efficient instruments of the teacher (and students) from the pedagogical perspective, - it cannot be difficult to use for anyone of the teachers that can benefit from technology in their classrooms, - it is efficient and economic from the teaching time and from the learning time perspectives, - it is memorable for the learners, as it appeals to their visual style of learning, - it can be later on re-created by the student during their learning process (and sometimes homework should refer to that), - variety can be ensured by using it in different ways, - it is therefore both versatile and interactive. Some of the ways this tool can be used in the language class, in process or as a product, are the following: - at the warming stage of the lesson, to introduce new material gradually, apparently improvising, but in fact eliciting input from the learners and raising their interest to the topic at hand, - at other stages of the lesson - to provide input that supplements/adds/completes/changes a.s.o. the one in the course book, - to host feedback from the class at the end of tasks that require various opinions from the students, - to note down the results of the elicitation process, - to created mind maps facilitating re-combinations of items, - to amend previous input in accordance with new information, - to create working tools (tables, for instances) for the classroom activity or to illustrate homework patterns, - to record the input from the students, marking their mistakes (by shading various portions of the sentences, by colouring them differently) and even as a form of prompt error correction for pronunciation or grammatical matters, by appealing to the students’ sense of humour, therefore in a non-threatening manner. It is less time consuming and more memorable than the usual interruption of the lesson flow by the teacher for some of the reasons shown above. Moreover, the teacher can preserve these Word documents from each seminar or decide to use them again (or comparatively) with other groups, as well. They can be easily accessed in the computer and are much less perishable than the chalk/marker on the board. Furthermore, such Word documents provide the advantages of clarity of the text, in comparison with the hand writing, which is not always very legible, flexibility in the sense that they can be amended/further developed, transferability via email, as well as the possibility to apply the spelling correction promptly. We cannot of course present here all the possibilities and combinations that we can make using IT means in the language class. At the same time, technology keeps evolving extremely fast, making it quite difficult for the teacher to keep abreast of its latest developments. However, as Warschauer [15] pointed out, as language teachers, we should identify and improve our own approach to using the IT means in our own manner, on the basis of the educational context goals, teaching program and patterns, students’ needs and the technological resources at our disposal, in the best possible combination.
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