Language preparatory school students’ use of modern technologies to study English

Year 2020, Volume: 16 Issue: 3, 1402 - 1414, 01.10.2020

Başak Ercan

https://doi.org/10.17263/jlls.803824

Abstract

Providing language students with creative and effective language learning environments so that they can gain communicative competence is of great importance. Therefore, integration of technology into language learning has become much more valuable where the target language is taught as a foreign language, allowing learners to expose themselves more to the target language and it helps create natural environments for language learning. It is clear that today’s young learners are really keen on using technology. However, there is an argument going out about if there is a change in methods of teaching and learning a foreign language in terms of satisfying the needs of these “digital natives” and there is not much information about this issue at tertiary level language teaching and learning in Turkish context. Thus, the aim of this study is to address this gap and find out the most efficient and / or popular technologies used by learners to promote the development of language skills. Having this aim in mind, a small scale research was carried out among English language prep school students at a state university in Turkey. The results indicated that using modern technologies to study English is not very popular among the students and they are not aware of most of the strategies they can use. Another significant result is that the students need guiding to integrate ICT in their studies. Therefore, teachers themselves have to have the required skills to work with modern technologies to integrate ICT more into education settings.

Keywords

use of technologies, development of language skills, language learning environments

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