VALIDATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ICT-BASED TASKS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING: A EUROPEAN PROPOSAL

This paper examines the role of ICTs in the design of tasks for foreign language learning. We believe that teaching should be provided with a sense of usefulness in order to kindle students’ interest and making the teaching-learning process memorable for years to come. The embryo idea of the tasks depicted here was born back in 2012 when a group language practitioners from different corners of Europe met to come up with a European funded project (reference number 530863-LLP-2012-NL-KA2-KA2MP, PETALL). Basically, we attempted to devise a set of forty tasks which might flexible enough as to be adapted to any foreign language context across the EU borders (and beyond). In order to succeed, it was of paramount importance to validate and verify the effectiveness of each of them. For that, a collaborative network was established among the ten participating countries (namely, Portugal, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain) to test and trial the above mentioned tasks. In this paper we spotlight the final version of four tasks which have been implemented in different educational settings in Portugal and Italy.