ICT in language teaching: Analysis of select software

Abstract

In the field of language learning, several information communication technologies have been developed; a few of them are prominent and widely used, but the rest remain largely ignored, even though they may be highly effective. On the other hand, these ICTs are mainly used by individuals rather than by formal educational institutions. Moreover, due to dearth of open source software, users hesitate to take initiatives in purchasing packages that might actually be very useful. This paper attempts to highlight a few software packages, apps, and interactive social media (primarily developed for language learning) that can be effectively used in formal language teaching, which are of a nominal cost or free of cost, easily available, user-friendly and reduce the amount of time invested in language teaching in a traditional classroom set-up. Taking such criteria into account, Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Livemocha, Konkanverter, Google Translate are the software packages that will be dealt with in the paper.