Understanding Technologies

Abstract

Although technologies have a long history in language teaching (Garrett, 1991), it was hoped that the introduction of new teaching tools, such as networked computers, would make the long and sometimes tedious work of mastering a foreign language easier and more appealing (Warschauer & Meskill, 2000). In the last two decades, much of that hope has fallen on the computer. Now that hope is less clear, as the ‘computer’ evolves into multiple networked devices and many face-to-face teaching practices have proven resilient. In the previous chapter, with this in mind we introduced the concept of blended approaches within the context of language learning. We concluded the chapter with a discussion o..