Acceso usuarios
José Martín Gasca García
Technological growth has proved to be one of the most outstanding characteristics of the twenty-first century.
Language teachers need to take advantage of it in order to offer students a complete global updated education, even if adapting technology to language classes is not as easy as it sounds because it requires following a systematic process.
Throughout this work, the author proposes some steps to follow when trying to implement the socalled new technologies in the teaching of English as a foreign language.
We can divide the reasons that teachers may have to apply new technologies in the language classroom into two broad categories:
A. Reasons that can be applied to all aspects of education:
Technological advances almost always foster knowledge acquisition.
Familiarity with technological advances is generally essential to live and evolve in a world that always tends to be demanding, like the one in which we live in this twenty-first century.
Making use of technological advances is required to live in a globalized world.
B. Reasons that can be applied to the specific area of language teaching:
The fact that all teachers need to be updated in the most recent technological advances relating to the area, so that students can take advantage of them to get practice in the use of the foreign language.
The fact that technological advances can reinforce the knowledge that students can obtain in the classroom.
The above reasons lead us to propose a process of five steps to adapting new technologies in the language classroom:
-Developing a needs analysis;
-Developing an inventory for the new technologies that we will apply in the language classroom;
-Applying this new technologies inventory to the needs of students;
-Systematizing important information about technology;
-Piloting the application of the technology.
