Developing information technology skills for foreign language teachers

Abstract

The modernization revolution of the way in foreign language learning is always misconstrued as purchase of hardware equipments and set-up of language laboratories with less consideration of the improvement of teachers' quality education on computer-assisted language learning. The measurement of teachers' computational skills is restricted to the ability of operating computer or other apparatus and using multimedia courseware. Indeed, computational techniques are applicable to the whole teaching process, i.e., text processing of corpus linguistics in preparation for lessons, multimedia and hypermedia manipulation in classroom teaching, automatic exercise generation, and evaluation and assessment of language output produced by students. Based on the observation from the perspective of language pedagogy and educational technology, we propose that the computational skill training for language teachers as a minimum comprises general computer education, computer-assisted learning technology, and natural language processing.