Teacher Professional Development Using Mobile Technologies in a Large-Scale Project: Lessons Learned from Bangladesh

English Language Learning And Mobile Technologies

English language learning and teaching methodology has undergone many changes over the last four decades: moving from a traditional grammar-translation method to more student-centred methods such as Total Physical Response, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Learning, which are more popular among language teachers (see Richards & Rogers, 2001, for an overview). CLT, in particular, appears to be appealing to many teachers. Although teachers from different parts of the world have viewed and practised CLT differently, it is widespread in the ELT world. In addition to the student-centredness of this method, communication (and hence meaning) is at its heart. In fact, CLT is all about developing learners’ communicative competence in a target language (see Folse, 2010, for a review). Communicative competence refers to a user’s ability to use the language observing appropriate linguistic (e.g., tone, pronunciation) and non-linguistic (e.g., politeness) features while communicating a message to other users of the same language (Hymes, 1972). Following this notion, CLT classroom activities are developed by drawing on real life communication (e.g., giving directions meaningfully to a tourist), which focuses on meaning making in a social context rather than learning about grammar (for a recent review, see Littlewood, 2007).