Foreign Language Acquisition on the Web: What teacher? What student? What language?

Abstract

Foreign language acquisition on the Web and its consequent concerns in respect to its possibilities and limitations have been a major source of contention in the academic and business worlds. However, more importantly, the teaching and/or learning process through the Internet modifies the subjects and the objects involved in the challenges and strategies of foreign language acquisition. This reciprocity of transformations between subjects and objects refers to the idea that the material world is not restricted to a subjective action and that, as well as the subjects involved, the objects are autonomous and have what we can maybe call government or agency. In this way, it is objective of this research, part of the authoress's doctoral thesis, to show that the transfer of the teaching-learning process of foreign languages to the virtual learning environment goes far beyond the mastery of technological tools. It was intended to point out the complexity of introducing the Internet in learning activities. Accordingly, we used the quantitative methods for data collection through closed surveys of German teachers' attitude and opinion regarding the use of Internet German for educational purposes. The research's results indicated that there is still a persistence in maintaining the established roles despite the belief about the significance of the non-human element in the new context in which they are inserted. In face of that resistance, a mix of false expectations and false results are established, thus producing nothing "new" in a new environment. Keywords: Internet, foreign language acquisition, new materialism