Teaching Foreign Languages through New Technologies – Reflections and Proposals

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer a series of useful activities to use new technologies for teaching foreign languages. For this, after a section where we explain our concept of “new technologies”, several tasks are proposed to take ICT as essential tools to improve the (meta)cognitive development of students. On the one hand, we show tasks with an explicit linguistic objective (phonological competence, grammatical competence, lexical competence, discursive-pragmatic competence). On the other hand, activities without a specific linguistic objective are included, either because they work with integrated skills, or because they simply look for the incorporation into the classroom of affective issues (self-esteem, motivation or emotions), as well as the development of some higher cognitive processes (memory, reflection or reasoning). The main conclusion points out the extraordinary possibilities of teaching exploitation offered by new technologies, especially if the teacher is able to fruitfully integrate them with other teaching techniques.