THE BENEFITS OF NEW MEDIA IN THE TEACHING PRACTICE

Abstract

This paper presents some arguments based on research into multimedia opportunities in foreign language learning. It provides critical comments on different and sometimes controversial views of learners and teachers on how new media have been promoted in language teaching. The new media comprise combination of texts, sounds, computer-based exercises - like cloze passages exercises, jumble sentences rearrangements, or text reconstruction dialogues - and grammar tables and structures with supporting software tools enclosed in spelling programs, audio dictionaries and search engines, allowing the user to browse the entire range for specific topics of activities. All these are significantly beneficial to the language learning process. Notwithstanding all these benefits, it is doubtful whether these new computer-based methods live up to the claim to surpass the effectiveness of existing, traditional methods in language teaching and learning. Most of the traditional exercises, as well as those based on PC applications, largely rely on a substantial amount of authentic language contained in most of the reference works. All in all, we can say that