Opportunities And Challenges Of Information And Communication Technologies In Foreign Language Teaching

Opportunities of ICTs in foreign language teaching

The widespread use of ICTs in education enables university teachers of a foreign language to construct favourable learning environment, the properties of which are as follows:

• general characteristics ( Berry, 2011; Latour, 2010; Manovich, 2013):

  • ready access to the Internet with great variety and infinity of its resources; content is now increasingly open and freely available over the Internet;

  • free access and ease of use of devices for uploading, processing, downloading, coping, retrieving and transmitting information in its main forms: text, graphics, sound and video;

  • variety of ways, tools and services for conversion of textual, graphic, audio and video information into digital one and vice versa; data once encoded can be resampled, transformed and filtered endlessly and it can be stored in multiple locations;

  • ease of access to means of archiving and storage facilities for large amounts of information;

  • almost unlimited possibilities for delegation of mental processes of high sophistication into technical devices and computational systems;

  • affordances of user-friendly means of communication, providing, on the one hand, the mobility of communication (the ability to contact any person at anytime and anywhere), and on the other hand, immediate feedback from the networked software that ties humans and non-humans together into new aggregates;

• specific characteristics ( Bates, 2015; Popov, 2015; Sager, 2013):

  • ICTs tend to become more communicative, asynchronous, and diversified, thus offering teachers and learners more powerful tools for teaching and learning;

  • learners acquire powerful tools for creating their own learning environments, defining their personal learning paths, assessing their own advancement and demonstrating their skills and knowledge to their peers and teachers;

  • resources of Internet-based digital libraries make it possible for the teaching staff to create and maintain their own information collections of course materials;

  • the world simulated in educational practices through ICTs becomes the real world to those engaged in these practices.

The results of empirical research make it possible to assert that the use of ICTs by teaching staff of the department of foreign languages in the Orenburg Law Institute boils down to certain activities that can be arranged into seven main groups:

• creation and regular updating of the curriculum;

• design of content of academic subjects;

• elaboration of algorithms of students’ work with educational materials;

• construction of the learning environment;

• drawing-up a system for monitoring and evaluating the advancement of students at different stages of the course of study;

• arrangement of students’ independent study and extracurricular activities;

• teaching in the classroom.

Examples of ICTs that have proved their effectiveness and therefore become common in foreign language teaching and learning in the Orenburg Law Institute are as follows ( Feoktistova, 2009; Ilyutyuk, 2015; Nasretdinova, 2018; Popov, 2016; Zhukova & Khalyusheva, 2015):

• digital versions of printed textbooks and authentic textual materials in a foreign language;

• monolingual and bilingual online dictionaries;

• interactive educational complexes and electronic textbooks;

• on-line information resources and reference materials in a foreign language;

• podcasts (audio and video) in a foreign language;

• social networking sites, communication platforms, forums, blogs, two-way instant messaging and e-mail;

• virtual tours and immersive environments in a foreign language;

• online courses, services, websites and platforms tailored for teaching and learning a foreign language;

• drill and practice online content;

• interactive simulators of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar;

• machine translation tools from one language to another;

• sound-to-text and text-to-sound converters;

• software enabling teachers and students to create and modify various digital materials in a foreign language, such as video lectures, video presentations, mind maps and assignments for testing;

• assessment banks for testing students’ understanding and skills.

Challenges of integration of ICTs in foreign language teaching

At the same time, foreign language teachers have to take into account that the integration of ICTs brings to the learning environment a number of concomitant features that go far beyond the planned curriculum and declared goals. Most of these features can be categorized as “hidden curriculum” and “digital risks”.

The term “hidden (or implicit) curriculum” refers to the unspoken, unacknowledged or implicit values, behaviors, procedures, norms and outcomes that exist in the educational setting and constitute an important part of the educational experience. The hidden curriculum is described as “hidden” since it expresses and represents attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors, which are not clearly indicated in the curriculum or organizational structure but are conveyed or communicated without aware intent of educators and students. The hidden curriculum can play a positive role and reinforce the lessons of the formal curriculum or it can adversely affect the educative process and contradict the formal curriculum, revealing inconsistencies between a university’s stated mission, values, and convictions and what students actually experience and learn at the university ( Alsubaie, 2015).

Integration of ICTs into the FLT/FLL is associated with occurrence of the following facets of hidden curriculum:

• promoting learning environment beyond the classroom and rearranging classroom space which cannot any more be reduced to rows of desks and a blackboard;

• getting in touch with a vast number of educational materials of different modality and various cultural content;

• creating the effect of equality of teachers and students in their interaction because of free access and ease of use of most ICTs by all participants;

• reshaping modes and patterns of teacher-student and student-student interaction and communication;

• increasing ways and practices of feedback;

• modifying forms and types of individual and cooperative work of students;

• making use of new evaluation practices and rating scales;

• increasing complexity of the work of software in curriculum-making practices.

Another type of implementation challenges is represented by digital risks. The term “digital risk in education” is used in this text to indicate the risk linked to digitalization of education and to denote a phenomenon that has the potential to cause an undesirable deviation between planned and actual results of ITCs integration into FLT/FLL due to objectively existing uncertainty.

Foreign language teachers actively using ICTs have to deal with the following four main types of digital risks:

• risks generated by equipment and software:

  • eventual failures of software and digital services;

  • infliction of harm to computer software or stored information because of malware;

  • rapid obsolescence of software and hardware;

  • dependence on the availability and accessibility of students to proper digital devices in the case of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device);

• risks concerned with teaching methods:

  • complexity and difficulty of selection, verification, systematization, modification and adaptation of data from the Internet in compliance with the requirements of curriculum;

  • elimination of traditional paper textbooks in favour of open-source materials and e-textbooks despite the fact that hard copies of textbooks are traditionally standard in FLT/FLL and availability of digital resources cannot adequately replace paper textbooks;

  • teacher-student feedback problems due to misplaced reliance on computer programs and online services;

  • aggravation of competition between students and creation of a negative attitude to advances of others in instances of application of ICTs that require mutual evaluation or peer-assessment of task performance where the access to a new assignment depends on another student’s comments or where a student has to beat another student to get higher mark;

• content-sensitive risks:

  • Internet materials (texts, images, audio and video files, links to online resources) may contain outdated or incorrect data;

  • the content of Internet materials may intersect with, or be influenced by, political, ideological, and moral differences that are controversial or irritating within our society;

  • information available in the Internet may be unethical, violent, hateful, discriminatory and even illegal;

• risks attributable to the circumstances of ICT’s use:

  • the offered materials might be placed in the Internet as a result of copyright infringement or invasion of privacy;

  • pragmatic use of ready-made media content and digital services without any adaption to the goals of FLT gives rise to the teacher’s dependence on the creators of the employed websites, digital services and software; such a risk can be put neatly as “to programme or be programmed”;

  • the habit of modern students to constantly use electronic devices enables learners to reduce fulfillment of complex and time-consuming assignments to two steps: the student makes a corresponding request to social networks or other services available to him and finds a ready-made version of the solution of the assignment, whether it is a machine translation of a text, a made-up essay, a preformed presentation or a screen shot of the completed answer sheet to the test.