Abstract:

Language proficiency is an essential 21st century skill, and also important to attain several of the c’s included in these new ways of learning, such as creativity, communication and critical thinking. It is therefore necessary that language teachers obtain and develop these 21st century skills themselves, in order to transfer the knowledge and aid students in their work. A 21st century skill which might be as important as languages itself, and also vital in the development of the other skills, is digital literacy. Thus, language teachers needs high competence when it comes to digital literacy. There are many studies and policy documents being delivered on the need for digitalisation, new innovations in Educational Technology and the need for training amongst teachers of all subjects. The international and national policy makers stakeholders are aware of the new need.

The project Digital Competences for Language Teachers is focusing on the training needed for language teachers in order to utilize the full potential of Educational Technology. The project focuses on identifying the level of digital literacy and the related needs of language teachers all over Europe in order to develop course materials, workshops and an open online platform for sharing resources and practices.

In this article, we present the results of a study on the skills demanded from language teachers from the labour market. In this study, we collected over 854 job announcements from several European countries in order to answer the research question if employers are looking for digital skills. In order to further explore the field, we did a narrow document analysis on international, national and institutional strategies for digitalisation within Education. We were looking for a correlation between the strategic demands for digital competence of language teachers and the actual requirements listed in the job announcements at institutional level.

In this article, we will briefly present the project and the findings from the study with descriptive statistics. As an example, we will further analyze qualitatively the Norwegian strategies and job announcements in order to better understand why there is a clear discrepancy between proposed strategies and the labour market demands. We will further elaborate this through recent research on digital skills and habits in the Norwegian Higher Education. On this background, we will discuss to what extent the strategies are an instrument for the language teachers at the single institution.

Keywords:

Language learning, digital skills, CALL, labour market, strategical work.