Developing Digital Skills: The Power of the Online Medium in Foreign Language Teaching
Developing Digital Skills: The Power of the Online Medium in Foreign Language Teaching

Summary/Abstract: The foreign language class had to be re-invented during the last decade. This was mainly the result of the rapid development of technology. Foreign language teachers may have come to realize that the world was changing at full speed and, because of that, they had to keep themselves updated in order to face the challenges of the new world. The aim of this paper is to show how technology and the online medium have come to be used in the ESP classes (English for Specific Purposes – Medical English taught to medical students at the “Grigore T. Popa” University of Medicine, Iasi, Romania). The paper also discusses the role of the English language in the context of being the lingua franca of the Internet. In the latest years, the ESP classes have changed out of this necessity to understand the more complex role of the English teacher. Old methodologies were no longer sufficient to transfer an updated amount of information to our students. Therefore the paper also discusses how ESP teachers have started to use English as a medium of instruction in order to touch upon some various and relevant topics related to the medical field. In the new economy of things, by means of the English language, students may get useful knowledge related to their future profession, the ESP class becoming thus an opportunity to practice interdisciplinarity. Besides teaching ESP, we should also focus on how English may be used in order to make our students more aware of the challenges of their future profession and the impact and of the ways in which technology might have a great impact upon their medical activity.

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