Abstract:
The purpose of this research is to investigate the attitude of language teachers and students of some schools in Bolzano (South Tyrol-Italy), a particularly interesting bilingual area, towards language acquisition through technologies, especially mobile devices.
There are many studies about language teaching and language learning through technologies but not so many comparing teachers’ and students’ positions about an effective and/or possible implementation of task based and mobile-assisted language activities into the classroom.
We gathered data from a survey and focus groups.
Our findings indicate that teachers, apart of some internet-based research activities or some online-language exercises, are critic and not aware of the great potential of these tools into their daily classroom routines and often, for organization or technical problems, they are also difficulty finding appropriate applications. Students, on the other side, declare that they spend a lot of their free time using other languages on their mobile devices and they look positively to innovation in the language classroom.
The goal of this study was not only a comparison between the two ‘sides’, but also giving an input in order to create a shared opinion that new tools can be integrated into ordinary language lessons, that they increase students’ motivation and involvement, that they can help to validate some of their informal acquired language knowledge.
The research questions guiding our research:
Are language teachers aware that students are using ICT( in particular mobile devices) for out-of-classroom activities?
How far do language teachers integrate ICT in their in-classroom language teaching activities?
If they don't, why it doesnt' happen?
How much and for doing what are students using ICT, in general, and mobiles in particular out-of-the classroom?
How much are they using ICT in different languages from their L1?
A future possible development of our work could be a test-implementation-project in a pilot class, in order to observe classroom practice closely and collect linguistic data.
