What skills do language teachers need in order to use technology for language teaching?

The trend of using technology in language learning is inevitable. However, it is common to see that some language teachers are resisting to use technology in their classroom. Adapting from "technology enhanced language learning", this post seeks to some reasons why teachers might resist and fear technology and propose some ways that might help them in over come their fears and keep up with the tide of technology enhanced language teaching.

This model was pubilshed by Hampel and Stickler in 2005. In this model, they describe what skills are needed by those teaching languages online. These skills include: basic ICT competence, specific technical competence for the software, dealing with constraints and possibilities of the medium, online socialization, facilitating communicative competence, creativity and choice, and own style.

There are two reasons that this model should be highlighted:

(1) It focuses on both teaching skills and correlation between teaching skills and technology.

(2) It reflect on how beginner teachers develop their skills.

According to this model, the first level to teach with technology is basic competence in using computers. However, nowadays, the list of this basic skill should be expanded: we might now have to know how to upload or down load materials from internet and have some skills in maintaining social media rather than simply knowing how to handle keyboard and mouse. The second level is to have certain knowledge of some software that might be helpful in language teaching and learning, like Skype, Blackboard, etc. The next level is the ability to understand the strength and limitation of these software. And the forth level were emphasized by Hampel and Stickler because they felt need to built a online community to develop the communicative competence for learners. Teachers might need skills to make their students feel security and comfortable and set up rules in this online community and encourage students to communicate with each others. All these skills may be different from the skills that teachers have to build a community in real. And the highest level in the hierarchy is to develop their own teaching style.

I hope that this basic introduction of the pyramid may have made teachers feel a little more empowered to use technology in their teaching.