Learning Spanish as Foreign Language in the Internet Era: Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats

The Internet has come into our lives, and it has come to stay. Not so long ago, just 20 years ago, the Internet was a perfect stranger to most of humanity, and had only 40 million users (0.7% of the world population), of which... [ view full abstract ]

The Internet has come into our lives, and it has come to stay. Not so long ago, just 20 years ago, the Internet was a perfect stranger to most of humanity, and had only 40 million users (0.7% of the world population), of which two thirds concentrated on the same country that invented the Internet: United States (Redes Telemáticas, 2013). The Measuring the Information Society Report 2015. Executive Summary (ITU, 2015), published on 30 November 2015 in Geneva, Switzerland, noted that the number of Internet users worldwide had reached 3.2 billion, which represents more than 43% of the inhabitants of the planet.

The implications in Education of the emergence of the Internet are particularly important, as a new generation of learners has reached the age of entering university: the new millennium learners. The CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation) of the OECD (2008) reported some years ago an outstanding increment of access to Internet by children and teenagers. But at the same time, the main research findings of OECD in controversial areas such as the effects of technologies on cognitive skills development, social values and lifestyles, and educational performance, reveals how little is known so far (Cox & Marshall, 2007)

One of the fields in which the emergence of the Internet has had the most impact is in the learning of foreign languages. Learning a foreign language is not (or at least not essentially) an absorption of declarative knowledge, but rather the development of a skill (Bialystok y Bouchard Ryan, 1985; Faerch y Kasper, 1987; McLaughlin, 1987; O'Malley & Chamot, 1990; Schmidt, 1992; Castañeda et al., 2014), therefore, the Internet is profiled as an especially advantageous platform for learning Languages. The possibility of interacting linguistically via Internet, either with computer programs or with speakers (native or not) of the target language, is a clear advantage over any previous form of autonomous or partially autonomous language learning. The Internet has broken the limits imposed by the time and space required for learning: it is no longer mandatory to be in a place at a certain time for being able to work with certain communicative content with a specific and small human group.

The advantages of the Internet are so numerous, that it has created a fallacy: any didactic resource that thrives on the Internet, stimulates learning. So the fallacy consists in believing that the environment, clearly profitable, confers quality to any product that is in it. But what do we know about what is really on the Internet?

This paper will show that, along with the known Strengths and Opportunities of the use of digital resources in the learning of foreign languages, there are also Weaknesses and Threats. A large part of the resources available online have not been designed by specialists in foreign language learning, and therefore do not meet the quality standards that do comply with the materials edited on paper books. Is not possible to teach like we did in the past using the technology of the future. The digital revolution demands a pedagogical evolution.