Teachers' perception of the students' foreign language learning and the potential role of ICT

This article focuses on the learning problems that arise in the teaching of second languages. Nowadays, the introduction of new technologies in this field has had a relevant effect by offering new possibilities that did not exist in the analogue era. However, many of the learning problems persist, and one of the causes identified is the change in learning styles. The use of new technologies has fostered an experimental learning style among students. This style is incompatible with traditional classes of theory and practice, in which an intellectual effort is required to understand the theory and then put into practice what has been learned. The present work starts from this reality and tries to provide possible improvements. For this, an analysis of the main problems encountered by the learners in the various linguistic acquisition components (lexicon, grammar and processes of comprehension and production, both oral and written) has been carried out. The method used was a questionnaire answered by 113 active language teachers. After the analysis of the answers received, a series of specific problems of the teaching-learning process was enumerated and different IT applications and ICT resources were searched that could solve or at least minimize them

The Design of Disciplinarily-Integrated Games as Multirepresentational Systems

Disciplinarily-integrated games represent a generalizable genre and template for designing games to support science learning with a focus on bridging across formal and phenomenological representations of core science relationships (Clark, Sengupta, Brady, Martinez-Garza, and Killingsworth, 2015; Clark, Sengupta, & Virk, 2016; Sengupta & Clark, 2016). By definition, disciplinarily-integrated games (DIGs) are therefore multirepresentational systems with the affordances and challenges associated with that medium. The current paper analyzes the DIG structure through the focal parameters framed by the DeFT framework (Ainsworth, 2006) to synthesize effective design considerations for DIGs in terms of the specific design and intended functions of the representations themselves as well as the overarching environment and activity structures. The authors leverage the literatures on embodied cognition, adaptive scaffolding, representations in science education, and learning from dynamic visualizations to address the challenges, tradeoffs, and questions highlighted by the framework. They apply these research-derived design considerations to an existing DIG (SURGE Symbolic) and to hypothetical examples of other DIGs in other domains to explore generalizability of the design considerations and the genre