Design perspectives on technology, language teaching and language teacher education

Despite the national strategies and major efforts to promote pedagogical use of ICTs in education, training programs for in-service teachers have often failed to develop sustainable pedagogical practice. For sustainable development, teachers need to be offered opportunities to explore the role of technology in relation to their concept of language and learning, and reforms should be designed in negotiation with teachers and students. In teacher education, aspiring teachers are being informed of the latest research results, but bringing the theory down to practice is a major task that calls for development work soundly based on research. In this paper we suggest that design-based research (DBR) may help to meet some of the challenges related to integrating technology in language teaching and language teacher education. We claim that teachers need to develop their expertise in multimodal pedagogy, not so much in the use of specific technological applications. To support our claims, we draw from a study where the pedagogical thinking of aspiring language teachers was analysed during the subject studies and new research-based pedagogical structures were developed.