Foreign Language Teachers’ Activities to Develop Students’ Digital Citizenship Competences: Findings of the Dice. Lang Project

Abstract

he extreme situation connected with the outbreak of the pandemic coronavirus has forced foreign language teachers worldwide to challenge their teaching competences and approaches when teaching remotely. Now, more than ever, foreign language teachers are forced or encouraged to implement digital materials, learning objects and environments. Meanwhile, foreign language teachers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes related to Digital Citizenship Education (DCE) are tested and challenged, too. The aim of this paper is to explore how confident and knowledgeable about DCE foreign language teachers are in order to offer activities that can enhance the development of language learners’ digital citizenship competences. This study presents the survey findings of the ERASMUS+ project: “Digital Citizenship Education and Foreign Language Learning” (Dice.Lang), which brings together five European partner universities: University of Munich, University of Aveiro, University of Latvia, University of Limerick, and Siena Italian Studies. There were 627 foreign language teachers (312 pre-service teachers and 315 in-service teachers) in total who participated in the online survey representing Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, and Portugal. The findings highlighted the needs foreign language teachers have to develop and apply their expertise on DCE in their language lessons. The authors of the paper present their vision to address the teachers’ needs, providing and analysing samples of a comprehensive set of open educational resources (OER) available in English and additional European languages. These OER, which have been designed by the Dice.Lang consortium and confirmed by the questionnaire results, aim at developing language learners’ digital citizenship competences. The resources intertwine the five DCE strands created by the consortium (Critical Digital Literacies; Intercultural and Transcultural Perspective on Digital Exchanges; Identity-oriented Component; Content-oriented Perspective and Critical and Meta-reflective Component) with the existing European theoretical frameworks.