What Was Old Is Made New Again: Using Technology to Enliven Language Learning

Abstract

Technology, the latest buzz word, constantly appears in newspapers, magazines, television programs, and even in our professional journals. What do we mean by technology? My colleague and I prefer to use the word in a broad sense, for everything from tape recorders to computers. The potential of new interactive technology is exciting and holds much promise, but we should not forget the old technologysuch as audio tapes, transparencies, and slideswhich still has much to offer us.1 For those of us who have dreams greater than our budgets, there are many affordable ways to exploit traditional technology for communicative teaching. In this article, we will describe several techniques using older technology to develop listening and speaking skills, and we will show how readilyavailable materials can be used effectively in the classroom as well as the laboratory.' Imagine you have been assigned to teach a beginning Spanish class. Since you have been given a textbook and a syllabus, you know which chapters you must cover by the end of the semester. For your first class, you plan a lesson involving an audio cassette. Within minutes after you start, however, your students seem bored. This scene occurs innumerable times in both the classroom and the language laboratory. Gone are the days of watching the radio. Part of the reason for this boredom is that our students belong to the television generation and are accustomed to playing fastpaced video games, listening to high-quality audio tapes and compact discs, and seeing professional video tapes and full-color illustrations in magazines. They expect similar entertainment in class. We definitely are doing the right thing by bringing in audio-visual aids. My colleague and I, nevertheless, find that students generally do not respond favorably to many of the materials, such as drill tapes, which are available commercially. Overall, students want variety, and they need to be actively engaged in discovering language. Many of us are required to use textbooks chosen by others and to follow a set curriculum. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to use supplementary materials. We should not, however, allow ourselves to be limited to the text and the tapes that accompany it, even though these certainly have their place. While more and more good materials are being produced, the development of commercial audio-visual products is moving slowly; thus, we are discovering that we must produce our own materials to enliven our programs. From our experience we have found that the audio-visual components of a course should not be slavishly textbook-bound and that inexpensive techniques to breathe life into our delivery are at our fingertips.