Book+Rationale

The advent of the Digital Age has caused a radical disruption of the pedagogical foundations of language teaching, and it pressures language educators to re-conceptualize the nature of technology and its place in the foreign language classroom. Technology has massively impacted in fact the way society lives, and it continues to shape the daily habits and activities that characterize the new generation, which is defined by Prensky [|(2001)] as a 'digital generation', for whom the use of the Internet is the norm, and that does and learns things differently and through different means than the previous generations.

Consequently, conventional teaching methods and classroom activities that do not embrace technology are most likely today to be perceived by students as out-of-touch and unrelated to their life. Most of all, traditional teaching methodologies risk of being completely ineffective, because they often only take in consideration the classroom as the learning enviroment. Nevertheless, new technologies enable to expand today education outside the classroom, and teach students a foreign language and culture through the tools, which have indeed changed the way society communicates, and that force educators to re-assess what skills are necessaries for students to learn in order to survive in the 21st century. Through CALL, Lee [|(2000)] asserts that students not only can extend their personal view, knowledge, and experience of languages and cultures, but they can in fact also learn to apply this knowledge into the //technology-d//riven society that they are building for themselves.

In second language learning in particular, the digital generation has today the possibility to travel the world virtually from a desktop or cell phone, interact with native speakers and other language learners remotely through chats, blogs, online video games and social networking, and to practice language and cultural skills through engaging computer and web programs. These activities are clearly more appealing to digital learners than traditional grammar lectures or face-to-face interactions with teachers and classmates. Moreover, these are the types of tools that students use daily in their personal life, therefore it becomes crucial for language educators to teach students to apply their technical skills effectively to education and the learning of a foreign language and culture. This book builds on this growing reality and suggests the integration of various emerging Web 2.0 technologies as a solution to the problem.

I have been researching materials in preparation for a series of seminars in CALL that I will run in the Fall 2010 semester to pre-service foreign language teachers. When I was evaluating textbooks and resources for the seminars, I discovered, however, that currently there is a lack of textbooks that properly educate about emerging Internet technologies and suggest actual ways to effectively integrate them into language lessons.

Most resources currently available on the market only offer compilations of articles and scholarly research, that although they provide valuable pedagogical analysis on the usage of internet based tools into the world languages classroom, they fail to provide adequate technical training that explains teachers how to actually use the technologies covered by the articles. World Languages 2.0 will instead provide clear detailed step-by-step visual explanations on how to use the Web 2.0 tools presented in the book.

Similarly, books that are currently available on the market and that do present technical training on emerging technologies seem to exclusively focus the attention on a narrow array of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasting and course management systems. However, the proliferation of Web 2.0 provides today a myriad of other engaging and pedagogically effective instruments. World Languages 2.0 will provide a real opportunity for foreign language teachers to examine, evaluate and learn various, free and less discussed emerging technologies and to explore samples of practical applications of these technologies to foreign language classrooms.

The activities suggested in this book will assist teachers in designing content-based lessons using technology to enhance students' language proficiency and cultural knowledge, as indicated by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Additionally the activities included in this book will promote students' competency using technology, as required by the National Educational Technology Standards. World Languages 2.0 will be a valuable resource for high school foreign languages teachers, and it could be used as textbook for Methods or Computer-Assisted Language Learning courses in teachers preparation programs offered by professional institutes, community colleges and four-year institutions.