Technology as a Differentiation Tool...

Technology as a tool in second language acquisition and foreign language teaching is only in its infancy. Early software programs have fallen short of communicative language teaching pedagogy and goals, imitating the drills of audiolingual methodology of the 1950s and 60s. It has been a marketer’s dream of the magical ‘pill’ of foreign language mastery in an easy-to-learn, guaranteed-to-succeed set of CD-ROMs (guaranteed to succeed in making money for the publisher, that is!). I have begun to use blogging in my own French teaching at MSU, as well as multiple on-line language learning resources. The more variety of input mediums and contexts that I provide my diverse group of learners, the more chances I have of meeting their individual learning styles and processes. It is only through the use of multimedia in reading, listening, writing, and speaking, that I can truly begin to differentiate my teaching within a highly-structured departmental curriculum. Our 200-level textbook takes the role of ‘resource’ in the classroom. As the old adage goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” becomes the backdrop to a rich array of visual media (photographs, video clips, news footage, music videos…) that I can use to provide contextual meaning and activate schema and prior knowledge of my students. By using images within context, a second language learner can ‘bind’ new vocabulary directly to the action or object, without translating from their first language lexicon. This concept of binding is crucial to building contextual cognitive webs of lexicon, whereby new vocabulary words are ultimately associated directly with their meaning and not with a translation. Anchoring second language input is not limited to visuals, but visual representation of sentences and connected discourse can enhance auditive comprehension, simultaneously providing language input in two forms (seeing and hearing), and thus increasing the chances of a learner attending to a form or a task at hand. Technology is rapidly progressively towards being more and more interactive, which is mandatory for optimal foreign language teaching scenarios. Just as we would research and critique any new teaching approach or textbook, so do we need to be critical investigators and consumers of technology use in the classroom. If the focus of the task is based upon the activity and not the objectives, then we are no longer constructively using the technology. Do I believe that new literacies can help us with issues of equity and differentiation in our classrooms? You betcha!