Abstract:

Students of today are more technologically advanced than ever before. They live their lives with technology at their fingertips. Not only do today’s young people own multiple ICT devices, they use them constantly in their day-to-day lives. This jump to the technological era is not as intuitive and natural for teachers as it is for young people, and the task of successfully integrating e-learning into the curriculum raises a number of questions. What is the role of e-learning in the classroom? Does it enhance the educational process? How can e-learning be successfully integrated into the classroom?

Using autoethnography as a form of self-reflection, this paper offers a narrative of good practice in the methodology of languages in an attempt to answer the questions raised above. The paper highlights methods found to be successful in introducing ways in which e-learning can be integrated into the classroom. The narrative explores the benefits of e-learning, and how engaging students on a level on which they will respond, using material such as online tools, may make a teacher's job easier. E-learning methods and strategies that work and support learning in the modern classroom, are introduced. The aim is to close the gap between traditional methods of teaching languages and the way in which technologically intelligent learners learn a language. We hope to show how e-learning can be the change agent that will take the language classroom into a whole new way of learning.

Keywords:

Autoethnography, e-learning, English language methodology, pre-service teachers, teacher training, technology-in-education.