On Some Problems Of Modern Educational Technology In Foreign Language Teaching Practice

As information technology has been developing rapidly since 1980s, the equipment of both hard wares and soft wares finally integrated all the media necessary, which include sound, graphics, animation, video and text, for foreign language teaching. The technology is now named as modern educational technology (MET). Modern educational technology has been embraced by the majority of Chinese college English teachers. However, most of them consider that MET is only a tool that combines blackboard, tape recorder and VHS (or DVD/VCD) together. How to internalize the visual and audio products of MET in foreign language teaching into the cognition of learners becomes a significant problem for researchers.First of all, the study defines the boundary of MET territory, and proposes that the change is not only a pure technological innovation, but it also brings foreign language teachers a revolutionary method: the ability to simulate real life and the process of human thoughts rather than a pure technological innovation. Without this concern, several problems of MET in foreign language teaching emerged. This study summarizes the problems in four aspects: problems on the MET contents,problems on the MET forms,problems on organization of MET lessons and problems of effects on learners'learning habits by MET.To solve the problems, proper theories should be applied as guidelines for modern educational technology application. As modern educational technology works on human's cognition, cognitive linguistics constitutes the best theoretical framework for modern educational technology. Cognitive linguistics emerged in the late 1980s, and it is considered as a new linguistic school or a new approach for linguistic research. Cognitive linguists think that language ability is a part of human's general cognitive ability. As acquisition of all human's cognition is in various media forms via human sense organs, modern educational technology is a proper tool to simulate the real life and the world for learners to cognize in the classroom. Moreover, modern educational technology also provides a reasonable field for cognitive linguistic theories to be applied in language teaching.Major cognitive linguistic theories will be applied and analyzed in the MET circumstances, such as categorization theory, metaphor theory, image schema theory and script theory. For each theory, various instances, most of which are the actual practices in MET classroom, will be proposed and analyzed in the body of the dissertation.Moreover, the analyses will be categorized into two aspects. The first aspect focuses on the teaching objects in MET, i.e. the language or socio-cultural knowledge. If MET is a container, the first side in this study is the objects in the container. However, MET is also an object pointed by learners'cognition, so MET as a container will be analyzed as the second aspect in the study, and categorization theory and image schema theory will be applied to analyze MET itself and its effects on learners'cognition.Finally, based on the analyses, this study tries to draw some conclusions, which account for solutions to the problems raised in Chapter 2 in the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Moreover, this study also puts forward some proposals for the development of MET in foreign language teaching.This dissertation is made up of 3 parts:The Introduction defines the boundary of MET that is involved in foreign language teaching and the scope and approaches are also illustrated in the Introduction.The first part of the dissertation includes Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.Chapter 1 gives a brief retrospect on the previous researches on MET in foreign language teaching, and another important content in this chapter is to highlight current situations of MET in foreign language teaching. Based on the current situation, problems of four aspects are summarized at the end of this chapter.Chapter 2 discusses the possibility of cognitive linguistics as a theoretical framework for MET in foreign language teaching. After presenting the language view of cognitive linguistics, this chapter expatiates four major theories of cognitive linguistics and their possibility of application in MET.The second part is the body of the dissertation, which proposes and analyzes the foreign language teaching practice of cognitive linguistics in MET. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 constitute this part.Chapter 3 analyzes the contents of MET in the perspective of three theories of cognitive linguistics, among which the categorization theory is the major one. In this chapter, categorization of lexical elements and grammar are discussed in MET. Metaphor theory and script theory also find their ways in MET.Chapter 4 takes MET itself as a cognitive object, whose organization also creates significant impact on learners'cognition and the realization of final teaching mission. In this chapter, MET itself is categorized by its forms, and different organizations of these forms are analyzed with the perspective of image schema theory. Then, categorization of MET demonstrating pages and en-route modification are discussed in this chapter.The conclusion is the last part, some solutions to the problems of MET in foreign language teaching are proposed and the suggestions of MET development are put forward at the end of this dissertation.