Abstract:

The bases of social learning require that both the community and the social environment play a leading role in the process of “teaching – learning”. With the introducing of digital learning, telecommunications, the Internet commenced the era of methodological change in the area of education since it created and developed multiple applications based on these principles and among those specifically targeted for the area of teaching foreign languages. As one can imagine, these changes influence not only the way of giving a lesson but motivate a teacher to reconsider their form of teaching, modify it and redirect it towards social learning.

It is necessary therefore, to change not only the mentality but also the methodology and this is where we talk about a digital task that presents actual language use, active cognitive processes, involves work planning, skills integration and has a final communicative product. The teacher should especially stick to this idea of a final communicative product viewed as collaborative work. In this context, the transition from a traditional task to a digital one will seem a logical and necessary step. Herein we can use the principles laid down in Web 2.0, in other words, if we apply the principles of Web 2.0 to the traditional task, we can be talking about the digital task or the task 2.0. We incorporate the concept of collaboration and sharing in the network to the traditional task and thus we would have a definition of a digital task. The student is considered as a social agent that generates collaboratively the content (either synchronously or asynchronously), and shares it with other users in order to get to the group knowledge.
Nowadays all textbooks of foreign languages offer some kind of a digital task, more or less developed, either in print or digital version, so the introduction of digital tasks into the language classroom becomes again an obligation for the teacher and a language center.

Keywords:

Teaching foreign languahes, digital tasks, telecommunication.