BLENDED LEARNING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING: SUCCESSFUL APPROACH OR JUST A TRENDY ONE?
BLENDED LEARNING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING: SUCCESSFUL APPROACH OR JUST A TRENDY ONE?

Summary/Abstract: The mixture of learning sequences taking place face- to- face and online, known as “Blended Learning” (BL), is a trend in foreign language acquisition, in full swing nowadays. By contrasting the innovations of blended learning to those of the traditional approaches, this paper tries to discriminate, within the inventory of teaching strategies, between structural changes and cosmetic ones, in order to identify the elements that truly promote the learning of foreign languages by the generation shaped in the spirit of the digital technology, as opposed to techniques focusing on attractiveness and/or games, which only manipulate the people’s desire to purchase things, but are no more than a secondary, if not complementary factor in reaching the proposed learning objective. Using an Austrian theoretical model we have tried to prove that the e- learning component is indispensable for foreign language learning today, in both stages of BL, i.e. face- to- face, and online, wondering whether the large- scale use of e- learning in teaching foreign languages nowadays is going to be the future path towards securing success in creating and developing linguistic competencies.

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