Abstract:

Having seen the advent of digital electronic and telecommunication technologies in teaching foreign languages over the past few decades, the theory of language education is faced with a number of new challenges which require a thorough methodological reflection. It is necessary to resume research in this area in order to redefine the place and role of a teaching aid in the methodological system of language education changing the focus of research from the current predominantly empirical plane to the theoretical one.

The paper poses some questions, inter alia whether the educational environment has changed fundamentally with the introduction of new technologies; whether the quantity-to-quality transition is now under way; and whether the digital generation of teaching aids has induced the emergence of a different quality of education. It posits the need to ponder over the new opportunities that these technologies offer for organizing the teaching / learning process.

From the perspective of language teaching and learning digitalization, the search for an appropriate methodological approach to the research in question has become essential. One of the possible options could be the use of the traditional didactic triangle. As a further development of this concept, its transformation into a didactic pyramid, and then into a tetrahedron turns out to be promising. This allows researchers to regard modern teaching aids as intermediaries between the content, the learner and the teacher, and to single out different planes of the pyramid / tetrahedron ("learner – content – technology", "teacher – content – technology", "teacher – learner – technology") so as to analyze and describe the relationship between the corresponding elements of the educational process.

Another suggestion is to draw upon the contemporary idea of “learning environment”. Modern scientific and methodological publications display a batch of closely related or overlapping concepts such as "information space", “information and communication environment”, “information and educational environment", "educational environment”, “information environment”, “learning environment". This idea seems to be highly productive in working out the methodological foundations for integrating present-day electronic tools into the theory and practice of language education. The three types of environments which the latest literature features most often are: 1) environment centered on knowledge representation; 2) environment centered on the learner’s activities aimed at knowledge and skill acquisition; 3) mixed-type environment. The paper presents the authors’ reasoning behind choosing the mixed-type environment as the one to give precedence to as a source of knowledge and a tool for organizing a whole variety of self-study activities of students.

Keywords:

Electronic and telecommunication language teaching technologies, teaching aids, methodological approach, traditional didactic triangle, didactic pyramid, didactic tetrahedron, learning environment.