Abstract (eng)
Since the advent of the digital revolution our social, societal and economic life has changed profoundly. We now live, work, learn, and play in a rapidly changing communication landscape of which the most revolutionizing changes are yet to come. Nevertheless, the implications on education and language learning, besides countries as South Korea, Australia and the United States, have been minor and focusing on the Austrian classroom it can be seen that teaching in the 21st century is not significantly different from the past hundred years. The question is, how do the inventions of the digital age affect the ways we learn and teach languages and why should they bring change to the language classroom?
This thesis aims to give an overview of technology-enhanced teaching methodology and applications for the English language classroom and further investigates in how far the Austrian EFL classroom is fit for the needs of the 21st century. The first part will provide the theoretical framework for said discussion by providing a short history of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) with a focus on EFL teaching and an overview of existing classroom technology from websites to social media platforms to blogs and wikis and many more. The second part of the thesis will describe my research project which is being held in an Austrian EFL classroom near Vienna and is seeking to portrait how technology-enhanced language learning can increase students’ motivation towards language learning in a concrete example of creative writing. Besides describing research design and methodology, outcomes and implications for future EFL teaching in the Austrian classroom will be provided.
Although this is by far not a new topic to EFL methodology, which has seen numerous publications on digital teaching trends in the past decade, this thesis should give practical insight into modern EFL teaching for the Austrian classroom.