Changing the Course: Interpreting and Elaborating Scientific Texts Aided by ICT

Abstract

Changes to the pedagogy of foreign languages (FL) are taking place in response to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) available for learning. These changes provide instructors with opportunities to become meaning facilitators and designers. This article presents the rationale behind the pedagogy for a university course to enhance FL for academic purposes. The paper refers to three editions of a course with around 15 participants each, native speakers of Spanish who had an A2 to B1- English proficiency level in the scale of the Common European Framework of Reference. They came equipped with disciplinary knowledge in education and needed to build the state of the art of their research proposals. They had to submit an account of up-to-date literature and of research reports appearing in books, journals and repositories. The course, aided by ICT, helped them search, find, understand and integrate to their projects valuable literature available in English and in Romance languages. Participants drafted in English their research interest and learned to prepare an oral presentation. The article puts forward moving away from a focus on language to a focus on problem solving, and presents some of the strategies, procedures and ICT support that served the participants’ needs.