MET As Program Resources For College English Teaching And Learning: Application And Implications

Modern Educational Technology (MET), as program resources, plays an important role in college English teaching. As a matter of fact, it is revolutionizing the whole process of foreign language teaching and learning.Modern learning theories, such as Constructivist learning, meaningful learning, and intrinsic-motivated learning, all underlie the application of modern educational technology in language teaching and learning. Constructivism holds that individuals are actively involved right from birth in constructing personal meaning, that is, their own personal understanding from experiences. Meaningful learning believes that learners always concentrate on what is closely related to their daily life and what is of interest to their life. The irrelevant and uninteresting things are always out of their mind and far from their attention focus. Intrinsic-motivated learning points out that when learners are inherently motivated, not expecting rewards from the outside, effective learning occurs. MET can provide learners with a visual context of the target language, promote collaborations and social interaction between students and teach foreign language literacy. It may also help teachers evaluate their students since the computers can keep records exactly and analyze them accordingly. Moreover, learners can carry out individualized learning with MET. To sum up, modern educational technology holds a great deal of promise in supporting foreign language teaching and learning. However, some teachers have found that the alleged pedagogical benefits of MET application are not always the case as expected in some teaching contexts. On the contrary, MET sometimes prevents language learning because of its inappropriate use. Learners also found out that they could not take advantage of the MET while learning language. Accordingly, a MET application research agenda should be carried out to seek concrete results concerning successes in and failures of language teaching and learning with a variety of MET activities.This thesis investigates the current situation of MET as program resources for college English teaching at Quartermaster University, exploring the effectiveness of the integration of MET and language teaching and learning and providing some pedagogical implications. This study illustrates that MET applied as program resources does benefit college English teaching but there are still many problems with its application. It is wise for the teachers and learners to reconcile what is desirable with what is acceptable and possible, therefore, they should optimize other existing resources to solve the problems caused by inequality and unavailability of MET as program resources. It is also essential for the teachers to have a clear conception of the relationship of MET and pedagogy in order to design and apply course wares appropriately. In addition, students have beliefs in the benefits of MET as program resources, resulting in enhancing their individual language learning and efficiency.The investigation conducted in the thesis is only a representative for some of the ordinary universities and points toward a possibly fruitful direction for other practitioners to explore in this field. How to make MET as program resources sufficiently work in the process of language learning and acquisition is the key issue.MET has the potential to play a major role in college English learning and instruction. However, the development of this potential is still in the early stages. There is still a long way to go.