Assignment #1:Text book: Imagine you are in a classroom 20 years in the future.

Imagine you are in a classroom 20 years in the future. In that futuristic classroom describe how language acquisition might take place. What kind of technology might be used? Will there be more or less emphasis on learning minority and majority languages? What motivations might the students have in the futuristic classroom? For what purposes are languages being learned? What forms of assessment are being used?

When imagining a futuristic classroom, I found it very challenging and hard to predict because I started college 20 years ago and I see how technology is growing in education. I remember at that time classrooms were set up different. There were classic blackboards, professors, notebooks with pens, pencils and erasers. Nowadays, we have online classes, computerized devices like tablets and even smartphones, and colleges are less crowded. I have seen how the use of technology is increasing and taking our jobs. I am concerned because I feel that eventually, what we see in technology as a great tool, maybe 20 years from now it will not be as great a tool for our new generations. I think that in 20 years it might be more convenient doing it online as a learning tool because people will have the chance to communicate around the world with people on line to learn and practice a different language. You will also have more choices at your fingertips; not many schools teach Russian or Japanese, but you can easily find a website that teaches you basic vocabulary in five minutes. Where I work, teachers have been implementing a program that will help students to increase their reading comprehension skills. Students get feedback right away. The only problem that I see is students’ attention span deficiency while they are doing a topic on the computer. Maybe in the next 20 years, computers will be more advanced and people will be able to adapt the computer to fit a student’s specific needs for learning. Right now I see students getting easily distracted and sometimes they just want to finish fast and do not take it seriously, causing error in their evaluation. Hopefully in 20 years, a program might exist that will easily help students to increase their attention span and do better while they learn a new language. At that time, I think that people might be more motivated to learn a minority language because society has been changing and people around the world are looking for a place where they can find opportunities. Someday, those minority languages might become majority languages. I recently saw on the news how people from Guatemala are walking their way through to the United States. I think that students in 20 years might be motivated in spreading their culture and their knowledge in different countries. I think students might have the same motivation for learning but hopefully technology will not affect the support of a teacher to guide them in their classroom. I believe that a combination of technology and educators is necessary to help students learn skills to become better professionals. I believe that the purpose of language is to communicate. It allows us to make friends, to express our feeling, believes and desires. Sometimes we take it for granted that people just know what we are saying, and instead of modifying the way we communicate, we just do not realize that communication is a two-way street. We end up using language as a weapon creating enemies.