Brave New Digital Classroom: Technology and Foreign Language Learning

1. SLA, Language Teaching, and Technology: An Overview

Chapter 1 SLA, Language Teaching, and Technology An Overview WHY TECHNOLOGY IN THE L2 CURRICULUM? Why should any foreign-language educator or student in the process of learning a second language (L2) have any interest in technology given that L2 learning is such a social, if not face-to-face, process? The answer lies in looking closely at the facts of second language acquisition (SLA) and the resources at hand. SLA, the process of learning another language other than your mother tongue (L1), is both an intensive and time-consuming activity.1 After years of experience in training field agents, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) estimates that anywhere from 700 to 1,320 hours of full-time instruction are needed to reach a level of high fluency (Bialystok and Hakuta 1994, 34). More specifically, the time commitment for learning a Romance language minimally approaches 20 weeks of intensive, full-time study at 30 hours per week, for a grand total of 600 hours, while for other languages, such as Russian and Chinese, the ideal exposure can exceed 44 weeks at 30 hours per week, or 1,320 hours. In stark contrast to these calculations, most university students spend on average only 150 hours per academic year actively studying a second language (10 weeks at 5 hours per week for three quarters=150 total hours). Upon graduation from college, students of whatever second language just barely reach the FSI’s lowest threshold requirements for achieving proficiency, that of the Romance languages. For students studying a non-Romance language at the university level, four years of second language study are not sufficient to obtain functional proficiency, according to these FSI estimates. 1 For those students who began studying a second language in high school and continued at the university level, the picture still does not seem much brighter. Many educators and public figures have expressed dismay that so much university language work appears to be remedial, because much of the material taught was already covered in high school. But in light of the FSI statistics, this is not really the case; it simply takes from four to six years to reach functional proficiency in a second language. Crucial to this L2 processing is the extent and nature of the input received—something all linguists and SLA researchers can agree on, even if their SLA models differ radically (discussed later in this chapter). In any event, university L2 learners , in terms of time on task, do not compare too unfavorably with children learning a first language during the first five years, with phonetic accuracy or accent perhaps being a notable exception (DeKeyser 2000). How can this realistic, if not sobering, depiction of adult SLA be sped up and made more efficient? Increasing contact with the target language is the most obvious solution. In particular, going to the region(s) where the target language is spoken and immersing oneself in the society and culture clearly remains the preferred but most expensive method of acquiring linguistic competence in another language. However, Davidson (2007, 277) warns that less than 3 percent of our university students go abroad on either academic or internship programs. What happens to the majority of our nation’s L2 students who are unable or unwilling to take advantage of study abroad? Most SLA theorists would agree, in some basic formulation of the issues, that formal L2 teaching is often unsuccessful because learners receive impoverished or insufficient input in the target language (Cummins 1998, 19). Technology, then, if used wisely, could play a major role in enhancing L2 learners’ contact with the target language, especially in the absence of study abroad. Whether technology fulfills this promise depends on how it is used in the curriculum. The principal focus of this book is to discuss how technology can best be employed in the foreign-language curriculum in order to enhance and enrich the learners’ contact with the target language and thereby assist the SLA process. A few words of caution, however, are in order from the outset. First, technology only provides a set of tools that are, for the most part, methodologically neutral. Selber (2004, 36) has called this attitude toward technology the tool metaphor: “From a functionalist design perspective, good tools become invisible once users understand their basic operation.” In reality, all 2 Chapter 1 tools mediate our experiences in certain ways, which...