Abstract:

Today’s students have a world of information available to them via their mobile phones. No longer do they need to spend hours looking through the library and then have to remember the facts they discover. Why remember if you can bookmark?

There are still those who feel that this change is somehow bad; as if there were something intrinsically good in spending an evening looking for rather than thinking about information. It is certainly arguable that this change has left us free to use our brains for more important things: now that my language learners compose email, they can worry less about where to put the addresses and more about what they are actually saying. Should we not be preparing our students for the world in which they really live?

The fact is that unless we at least acknowledge the existence of technology, we run the risk of our language lessons seeming out of touch and irrelevant. In this paper we will look at the reasons why we should embrace technology and some of the tools available to us. It will also be demonstrated that at the heart of this there are also some surprisingly ‘old-fashioned’ educational values.
After an introduction to some key educational issues related to the role of technology in the English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom in the 21st century, 8 main points will be explored and covered with examples that can be applied in ELT Methodology:
1. Vision trumps all other senses One of the 12 Brain Rules by John Medina: http://www.brainrules.net/vision
2. Students want instant access to information
3. Students need multisensory input
4. Students expect immediate feedback
5. Students want interactivity
6. Students enjoy working in groups and they are highly competitive
7. Students have short attention spans
8. Students need digital resources that support autonomous learning & self-access

Keywords:

Digital, ELT, Language Learning, Differentiated Instruction.