Self and Other-presentation strategies: A Social Psychological exploration of the construction of social and gender identities in the university EFL class

Resumen

There is now an established literature on the uses of New Technology in the EFL class (Grandjean- Levy, 2002; Ktoridou et al., 2003). In fact, foreign language teachers have attached great importance to integrating Information and Communication Technology (henceforth ICT) into the curriculum. However, some recent studies have moved away from its basic uses and focussed on issues that combine ICT and the acquisition of a foreign language with the first step toward transforming a biased society. The present paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship which attempts to demonstrate that ICT has made a greater impact on education than most teachers realise (Stokes, 2001). For this purpose, the investigation, which involves first year trainee Primary School English teachers, combines a video camera project with an exploration of some dimensions of the construction of social and gender identities. The aim is to present an innovative approach to foreign language teaching that benefits from Social Psychology and expresses the interest in the total person and not simply in the intellect. More precisely, this approach has proved to provide a blend of the cognitive and affective way of teaching future practitioners that makes the university environment more productive.