Abstract
Over the last decade, IT has been used in various ways and with different rationales in the teaching of many disciplines in tertiary education. Among them, the teaching of foreign languages has continuously been making use of these new and more and more complex technical means of pedagogic support, in spite of a certain degree of reluctance that might have characterized the teachers' attitude at the beginning. This is particularly more so if the trainees are, as the case is in the educational context taken into consideration in this study, engineering students - more precisely Computer Science bachelor level in a faculty having English as the medium of instruction. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to draw the attention of the foreign language teaching community on the need to increase the students' awareness of the usefulness and versatility of IT for language teaching/learning and for learning in general. In the particular case presented in the study, namely a three-stage project entitled "I like IT" - inspired from a well-known TV programme in Romania - one interesting aspect is the fact that it is actually a combined IT focused activity. Thus, on the one hand, the topic of the project is making IT known via original TV show formats and, on the other hand, this is done by IT engineering students, using IT means in original combinations. The objectives of the proposal, which are at the same time the rationale for designing and teaching the activity, cover: developing the learners' communication skills in English similar to those they will most probably need in their career, by generating a quite authentic context and task for them to develop their own creativity, team spirit and competitiveness with fair play underlying it, as well as sensitizing the trainees on the importance of IT, their field of study and future work, as a crucible where pedagogical, linguistic, socio-affective components melt into a personality capable to face the expectations and requirements of today's knowledge society. A thorough description of the project stages is provided, with examples of the students' products and a discussion of the findings, with a view to submitting the approach to the arena of the (foreign language) teaching community debate. |
Keywords
IT in the language class, multimedia in learning, creativity, project work, communication skills development |