May 2005 — Features

Print this article | Email this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

The Advantages of Using Technology in Second Language Education

By Li Wang - University of Central Florida

Learning is a collaborative process. According to Anderson and Speck (2001), students prefer working with a partner over working alone on computer activities. Leu (1996) adds that “students often learn about complex multimedia environments by showing each other cool things.” Thus, through collaborative technology activities, students benefit from working with each other. Technology has also created a great way to communicate with people in different cultures. For instance, the Internet offers a worldwide learning environment that makes distance communication fast and affordable. By using the Internet, cross-cultural cooperative groups can be built up.

Despite these advantages, potential drawbacks of using technology always exist. Some of the main disadvantages regarding technology integration in language classrooms include:

  • A few common pitfalls of Internet use include objectionable materials, predators, copyright violations and plagiarism, viruses and hacking, netiquette behavior, and privacy issues. Teachers must be prepared to deal with these issues as they use technology in their classrooms.
  • Startup costs, which include hardware, software, staffing and training, are expensive. Warschauer and Meskill (2000) indicate that intelligent use of new technologies usually involves allocations of about a third each for hardware, software, and staff support and training. It is often the case in poorly funded language programs that the hardware itself comes in via a one-time grant (or through hand-me-downs from science departments), with little funding left for staff training, maintenance or software.
  • Technology may not be good for every language at all levels. For logographic languages, computer typing may not help improve efficiency in composition, especially with lowerlevel learners. It also takes a long time for students to become familiar with computer typing; therefore, teachers should creatively use technology but not rely on it alone.
  • Spending too much time on computers is considered harmful to a child’s development of relationships and social skills (Roblyer 2003). The American Academy of Pediatricians calls for limiting children’s use of media to only one to two hours per day.

Van Dusen (1997) is optimistic that the technology integration movement will alter traditional professor-centered methods and bring about more constructivist ones. But he also emphasizes that this shift will not happen without intensive professional development. In Warschauer and Meskill’s (2000) view, it is futile to compare use of computers to nonuse of computers because a computer is a machine, not a method. Therefore, computers and the Internet create a vast new medium that is comparable, in some ways, to books and other print materials in a library.

The Future

We can definitely agree that technology has done a great job in helping language learning, but this is just the beginning of the age of technology-enhanced education. In the future, wireless networks, videoconferencing and other multimedia-enhanced communication methods will be more popular in the language classroom. However, teachers should always remember that technology is just a tool, and students’ learning achievement relies on appropriate and creative instruction. If you are aware of the pitfalls of using technology to design creative activities, technology will work harder and better for foreign language education.