How does technology enhance language learning?

  How does Technology enhance language learning? 

-When you look back and make a comparison between today and the past, it can be easily seen that language learning has evolved thanks to technology.Today, learners have more many opportunities to develop their target languages and gain access to diverse materials, resources that were once hard to reach.In the rest of the paper, some ways in which technology enhances language learning will be talked about. 

1-Technology-Enhanced Language Learning: Making learning student-centered 

-It is a teaching approach that features technology in language learning.It gives learners a lot of opportunities to improve their language skills.For instance, Computer Mediated Communication allows them to get in touch with other people from different places in the world through network and thus helps them be more fluent in speaking or writing.Learners can also make use of digital devices like electronic dictionaries while studying so that learning can be enriched.It provides important benefits such as allowing students to learn according to their own paces and decide in which order materials will be provided, making learning student-centered.Although it has some disadvantages such as causing expenses or risking that learners may largely depend on comp-uters without making efforts enough, it is a common thought that level of education has incre-ased with the arrival of technology. 

2-Improving vocabulary learning through Mobile Learning Technologies 

-Since mobile technologies have a remarkable part in many teachers’ and students’ lifes, it is beneficial to combine them with learning.Mobile Learning includes using portable items such as mobile phones, books, audial materials like DVD or CD, radio.There are two approaches in mobile learning: content-based or design-based.The former is concerned with developing acti-vities and materials for learning.It utilizes portable devices to present the content to students.The latter form is more about bringing out learning activities and materials for portable devices.Being different from content-based ones in which students are given learning materials by teachers, students build up their own learning and find materials on their own. As an example of benefits of mobile technology in learning, Stockwell (2007) establishes a connection between usage of mobile phones and vocabulary learning.Students carry out vocabulary-related exercises through mobile phones and system produces a profile for every student and detects areas that they have problems with.According to a poll that showed that mobile technologies were preferred more than other technologies such as desktops by students in Japan, it can be claimed that mobile technologies have made a contribution to vocabulary learning in Japan. 

3-Providing learners with resources, language exposure and authentic communication 

-Technology makes it easier to provide learners with extensive resources and input and thus learners get efficient exposure to linguistic materials.For instance, instead of using only one medium, making use of digital multimedia technologies provide learners with many options in language learning.It was observed that using audio visual technologies enabled learners to develop their knowledge of English in a better way than some others who utilized only one technological device, which indicates that the more use of technology there is in language learning, the more benefits learners will get, which makes the distinction between technology-enhanced education and traditional education bigger.Along with these, technology also enables students to make an authentic communication in non-native language.To do so, use of infor-mation and communication technologies has been utilized in order to provide learners with occasions in which they can communicate in non-native language. 

4-General benefits of Technology-founded language learning: Increasing standard in education 

 -It cannot be denied that technology has changed the way learning and teaching occur by incre-asing standard of education.There are some benefits of technology-founded language learning such as promoting communication, improving language skills, encouraging cooperative learning, giving motivation and decreasing nervousness.The point is that learners are more involved in learning activity.It’s a true statement that technology made learning more interactive because it gave a lot of learners from different places of the world access to educational settings.When it comes to collaborative learning, it is possible now to gather learners together making student-interaction available that definitely make a contribution to learning experience.In this way, technology has provided learners with an environment that they can exhange opinions in, which adds to their social relationships.Today, many learners have a chance to use different educational technological items.This actually increased comprehension in education because technological devices such as visual ones like videos or audial ones like sound recordings give learners a chance to draw a picture of hard concepts in their minds.Another factor that increased the standard in education is putting technology into the classrooms, because this causes learners to be more involved and thus to have a high level of motivation in classroom activities.According to Strong et. all (1995), in case learners succeed in being more involved in learning process, their motivation increases.This is important because learning process will be hard to be successful if learners have no motivation.So, as long as teachers use technology in an effective way, motiv-ation will be likely to be high. 

5-Helping learners improve their language skills 

-While learning a foreign language, practical exercises have an important role, because learners must improve their language skills such as speaking or listening in order to learn a language at good level.Technology provides them with these exercises.For instance, it allows learners to interact with native speakers of their target language via virtual platforms and thus it gives them opportunities to improve speaking or listening.Or, it can be claimed that technology-founded education produces learning activities that give rise to productive learning, which enables learn-ers to develop their autonomy.In this way, learners will be more willing to learn a language and thus develop their language skills.There are many other ways that they can benefit from technol-ogy in order to have advanced level of skills.For instance, they can make use of e-books to dev-elop reading or programs that can contribute to listening skill. 

6-Presenting new learning experiences, projects, programs 

-Technology gives learners new learning opportunities and enable them to have a chance to meet other cultures.For example, a project developed in Taiwan named AJET presented a chance to use latest technologies to students, which extended the limit of their learning ways. Addition-ally, this also made learning process more pleasant for them, because it was observed that learning through internet was liked more by those students.Since everyone has an access to internet, it provides learners with international materials, resources, occasions in which they make contact with native speakers of other languages, which makes them closer to people from other cultures.Since culture is an interconnected concept with language, recognizing culture of target language will help learners in their learning process, which shows the importance of technology here.In this way, technology allows learners to extend the scope of their viewpoints, to explore various shapes of knowledge and to recognize other cultures by putting them into real world circumstances, which actually indicates that language learning has got rid of its limited contexts. 

-An American council named ACTFL with its initials suggested inserting 5 Cs into language learning.Those are communication, cultures, communities, connections, comparisons, all of which are connected with language.What’s important is that technology is serving as the best way of realizing this purpose since it consists of a great number of networks, data banks, resour-ces.It is the most appropriate and efficient platform for this project. 

-Thanks to technology, some distance-learning programs were prepared such as AJET, which aims at making internet technology a means of realizing 5Cs project above. 

7-Information and communication technologies 

-The developing information and communication technologies bridge the gap between different dimensions of language: speaking and writing for example.It helps us collect texts all around the world, makes it easier to develop a multimodal information design and thus promotes to prepare content and spread it to a broad extent.It also provides learners with access to each other while they are not in schools, generally in the form of friendship-driven or interest-driven.The former gives them chances to get social by spending time with their agemates.They also meet new peop-le by attending some activities such as chatting or discussing about anything that they are inte-rested in.In the latter, being social is not the purpose.They are motivated to be involved in tech-nology.They establish communication with persons who have different features from many pla-ces in the world.All of these give them important opportunities to develop their language through diverse ways by making contact with strangers. 

8-Bringing a new model to education through CALL 

-When education occurs in a traditional way, learners receive information in a passive way.They don’t respond to the traditional form of education in an affirmative way, which limits their capa-cities to learn and this brings about the fact that they have difficulty in detecting and improving their weak spots in the learning process.For this reason, it became a necessity to come with a new framework in education which can give students an effective way of learning English via a test-based setting.Here is the part where computer-assisted language learning comes into play. CALL that has a broad part in education now allows learners to make use of sophisticated mech-anisms of this relatively new kind of learning way, which enables them to develop their self-learning. 

-Unlike students’ being passive in a traditional education, according to Dewey and Piaget, learning should be a process in which students are active by building meaningful information, linking it to what they know beforehand and thus making an explanation of what’s learned. Computers have a significant role here, because computers encourage students to take place in the learning process and thus allow them to develop their analytical thinking and problem solving abilities with the help of applied teaching methods. 

-With the renovated way in language learning through computer systems, mode of education has changed and it is thought that students are being motivated to enjoy this new, untraditional mode of education.That the rate of effective involvement of students has risen is an indicator of this. 

Some general benefits of computers in education 

-Utilizing computers while learning English gives students some chances to make contact with kinetic and sensual actions.The thing important is that these actions mostly make it possible to comprehend concepts in an applicative and tangible way.Besides, use of computer systems in learning English provides students with appropriate road maps and procedures like qualified studying means and abundant time to dedicate themselves to learning in order to take the lear-ning process on accomplishedly. 

-Besides, students benefit from fast learning, because momentary learning has become possible now since everything is just a click away for students at the moment. 

-Computers make the learning process easier for students now.For example, they can get help of computers for their homeworks, assignments, tasks or they can exchange opinions with their classmates through online chatting programs or they can ask their teacher a question about these assignments even when they are outside school, which forms a system that doesn’t leave students alone in language learning and that allows students to learn from computers. 

9- Technology as a reinforcement for students’ studying 

-If students have difficulty in understanding a lecture, they can record it and listen to or watch it later again, which is called lecture-capture.When compared to traditional books that are restricted with texts and pictures, e-books provide students with some options such as highlighting import-ant points or drawing mind maps.Technology also lets students extend their learning experiences out of the clasrooms, to their daily lifes through online supportive videos on youtube.This also lets them learn a language with its different aspects such as grammar, vocabulary or slangs.They can find some other videos that can make a specific contribution to what they learn in classes and help them understand points that they may have problem with.