I’ve heard many laudable reasons to learn a language, and some slightly suspect ones: “To find your future husband/wife – learning a new language and culture increases the size of your selection pool.”

Regardless of your motivations, it’s hard to ignore the continuing presence of modern foreign languages (MFL) in education. The recent Rose review, for example, sets out how foreign languages will become a statutory requirement of the National Curriculum at Key Stage 2 from 2011. There is currently a real interest in the role digital technologies can play in the application of MFL in the classroom. Social software and digital media are increasingly being used by teachers to help students’ access language learning, and language labs have been newly incarnated for the digital age.

So, how is this innovative software being applied in the classroom? Can it create a new interactive experience for users? And most importantly, can it save them from the future embarrassment of recalling only a disembodied voice from a long forgotten language lab asking “Où est la gare?”, when what they really need to know is where to find the toilet?

Blogs are increasingly popular, both as a place where teachers can find ways to share and develop their own practice, and as a teaching tool. Joe Dale is a leading practitioner in using ICT in MFL and his blog is an overwhelming collection of instructional podcasts, links and examples of where and how ICT is being used in MFL. With an ever increasing world of Web 2.0 tools such places are vital for teachers to find relevant tools quickly. It is this need that has led Futurelab to develop the Map of Innovations project.   Blogs are also being used as an area where students can access resources, relevant links, or showcase their own work to a real world audience.  ‘Langwitch!’ is a great example of a blog being used for different purposes (and features a video of Bill Bailey doing the Hokey Cokey in German – reason enough to visit it in my view). Part of the value of blogs for teachers is that they can be so flexibly used and managed, so don’t suffer from the restrictions of institutional VLEs.

MFL Teachers are also widely capitalising on new authoring software available to them to engage their students. This ranges from creating bespoke interactive exercises, through to downloadable podcasts explaining rules of grammar or giving listening practice. Ashcombe School in Surrey has even created interactive quizzes that can run on Ipods. It is interesting to reflect on this as a further example of the success of locally generated content and practice bring spread through networks, rather than being centrally led. Chris Fuller’s Spanish podcasts, for example, begun life as a support for his own students and have now been downloaded in excess of 50 000 times.

Microblogging is gaining momentum, both as a tool for teachers to develop their personal learning networks, but also to communicate with their students. Free software Edmodo has been used by teachers to create a secure microblogging environment to engage with their students. Teachers are using tools like Twitter to create easy to access professional learning networks outside of their localities, and with people they may never have met face to face. This means that teachers have tremendous access to support networks to enhance their professional development, and a great electronic bridge to their students outside of class. For MFL where learning how to communicate is such a vital part of the subject, these social spaces and communicative tools are offering a new ways for learners (and teachers!) to discover, practise and share.

In considering the future of microblogging in education it’s worth keeping an eye on the use of Twitter in the wider world. One the one hand it has provided an enormously powerful and liberating way of decentralising information, (and knowing about things before others do can make you feel like you’re in the cool crowd). On the other it has a limited ability to express context, runs the risk of spreading misinformation, and in the case of the recent swine flu ‘epidemic’, fuelling a global panic.

In considering the use of technology in the MFL classroom it is worth briefly turning our attention to mobile phones. Although banned in the majority of classes there are examples which highlight their value as learning tools in their own right. They have been used to play podcasts and to record verbal assignments. In Ireland another project created an oral teaching and assessment system to support language students learning Irish.  Although there are certainly difficulties in allowing mobile phones in schools, there is an ongoing question of how the increasingly ubiquitous tools of mobile technology can be of value to mainstream education.

The use of new software and participative media in schools has also been used to support students in creatively approaching MFL. Free software like Vokis allow students to put their recorded voice to created avatars to build confidence in spoken language skills. Packages like Glogster allow students to create interactive posters with embedded media and text. MP3 players and digital film have been used by students to create films, and dialogues to support their learning. Again this highlights the value of how interdisciplinary and creative approaches to learning have been seen to motivate and engage students.

So what does the future hold for the use of technology in MFL? Overarching educational trends like Mobile Learning and resource sharing are big opportunities waiting in the wings. The Open School for Languages is a large scale DSCF funded project to realise a key recommendation from the Dearing review. The creators, Lightbox, are creating an online resource to support secondary MFL – it will go live in the coming year.

In the longer term, Natural Language Technologies (NLT) gain increasing strength as research in the field deepens. There is a tentative interest in Chatbots - an artificial intelligence programme attempting to recreate the experience of talking to a human.  They offer 1-1 interaction in the language, can be less intimidating than speaking to a real human, and are capable of holding independent conversations with multiple users.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 8:09 am and is filed under schools, tools and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.