what are the innovative and integrated methods that cancinfuse ICT for teaching and learning specificcsubjects
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this most important question in the context of Second Language Acquisition, How can ICT be used to improve teaching and learning? In this respect, I believe that the development of both teachers' and students' motivation in schools settings is a crux issue that we must cope with in our educational practice. In doing so, we cannot skip to using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) in the learning process in the context of Second Language Acquisition as cross-curricular content. Hence, although the approach, which arouses a keen interest in the didactic areas regarding second language acquisition, is clearly of communicative nature, it should be pointed out that these kinds of tasks will be adjusted to the various elements that affect our educational practice. In that way, this serves the following purposes:
Integrate ICT’s in the learning process, as a key competence and contributing to the acquisition of the target foreign language;
Use ICT’s in the classroom to work on information processing, authentic communication, and on the learner autonomy, as the builder of his or her own learning process;
Give ICT’s a role to help young people be able to arrange, evaluate, and decide on the information that comes to them;
Challenge students with different types of supports and formats and, therefore, a great variety of activities in which they pass from receivers to makers;
Bring students to the real contact with the target foreign language and users (whether natives or not), by means of the electronic mail, "chats", "blogs", or spaces wiki;
Bring students to the cultural elements through authentic and real-time documents;
Attend the diversity of students, using the copious offer of interactive exercises available on the web.
For example, let us suppose a classroom situation in which the teacher puts forward this learning principle, “we must promote functional learning; consequently, we will promote the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), thereby Including linguistic components, skills and communicative and learning strategies in an integrated way”.
Therefore, the methodology, the how, what, and why, is where teachers’ good educational practice is actually shown. In this way, they should integrate the following methodological aspects directly related to students’ learning:
Learning guidelines;
Methodological guidelines;
Learning principles;
Teaching methods;
Teaching activities;
Collaborative work;
Resources (use of ICT, integrated internet-based materials, etc);
Like this manner, every school center should have their special educational measures, which focus on awareness to diversity, both organizational and curricular, allowing them, in the exercise of their autonomy, a flexible teaching organization, as well as a personalized attention to students according to their needs. Thus, we, as teachers, must take into account certain indicators that students usually present with certain alterations at cultural and socio-cultural levels, such as students’ country of origin, the curricular gap between them, their lingua franca, interests, how they behave. Briefly, the indicators are as follows:
Students’ country of origin
Lingua franca
Previous schooling
Presence or absence of behavioral alterations
Mismatch between more and less advanced students
Degree of motivation towards school
Appropriately, it may be necessary to set apart students at these interesting points and then to adjust our educational response accordingly. For example, we could adopt certain methodological guidelines such as their integration into a group where they feel more secure, thereby providing them with better instruments in the basic areas in which there is evidence that progress is taking place.
Fittingly, McCombs (1988), presents an overview of the most important issues surrounding “the mental processes that underlie motivation to learn and skill domains (metacognitive, cognitive, and affective) that are represented by these processes. She points out, then, that a learning strategies training program has, as one of its most important functions, the purpose of promoting self-control of learning or self-directed learning.” In a similar way, Scovel, 1978, (cit. in Foss and Reitzel 1988: 442-443) summarizes: “debilitating anxiety . . . motivates the learner to ‘flee’ the new learning task; it stimulates the individual emotionally to adopt avoidance behavior” …it is the students’ perceptions of the context of communication, including the culture within which the communication is to take place, that plays a big role in students’ responses to communication activities.
Similarly, Chambers et al. (2004) take aim at providing “language teachers and trainers with a guide, in both practical and pedagogical contexts, to the effective integration of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) into language teaching and learning, both inside and outside the classroom.” These authors, then