ICT in the classroom – Gaps between policy and practice?TIC en el aula inglesa – ¿Huecos entre la política y la práctica?

In foreign language learning, required by the government's National Curriculum for children in England aged 8 to 14, the integration of technology into teaching methodologies has been explicit: “schools should use a range of resources, including ICT, (Information and Communication Technology) for accessing and communicating information in the target language" (Department for Education, 2007). This research investigates the role of ICT in language learning inside two English classrooms - a primary and a secondary – in order to explore the nature of motivation in educational technology from both the student and teacher perspective. The study elicits teachers' reasons for deploying the technology along with their emphases on the motivational advantages of ICT. It finds a marked tendency to use ICT for presentational, rather than autonomous or personalised learning. Children express subjective satisfaction with technology deployed in language learning and a desire to operate the technology more independently. The technology is, from this small scale study, teacher-led and teacher-driven, with few instances of the more autonomous communication possibilities outlined above (Department for Education, 2007). Field research findings derive from questionnaires of 60 pupils and (their) 2 teachers, as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers in two mainstream English school settings.