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Makale Özeti:
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Meta communication plays a key role in foreign language learning and teaching.
Broadly speaking, meta communication is communication about communication. Meta
communication is something that goes beyond communication and all language
learners and teachers should be familiar with its existence. It should be stressed that
meta communication which accompanies any message is very powerful. In face to face
writing lessons, the student can make emphasis on any point by utilizing larger fonts,
capital letters, or bold fonts in his essay. However, in virtual learning environments,
students can make use of emoticons like :-) “happy”, :-( “sad”, :-/ “perplexed”, O.o
“confused” to communicate about communication. Further, they can deploy some
acronyms like (BTW= By the way, ASAP= as soon as possible, TM= tomorrow) to easily
convey their messages. It should be emphasized that E-learning applications (virtual
worlds, second life, ICTs) are very beneficial in foreign language learning and teaching
since they create a platform for students and teachers to interact in a context with no
boundaries of time and distance.
In Transformational Generative Grammar, foreign language teachers describe syntactic
structures in English by using grammatical symbols with meta communicational
elements. For instance, every English Foreign Language-EFL or English Language
Teaching-ELT teachers or students is familiar with the symbols and related meanings
like (S= sentence, subject, V= verb, O= object, N= noun, NP= noun phrase, VP= verb
phrase, etc.). On the other side, when teaching English pronunciation to Turkish EFL
learners, foreign language teachers utilize phonetic symbols like /è, æ, å, ğ, w, ŋ/ to
write transcriptions of English words. These phonetic symbols have meta
communicational elements in their composition because they communicate about
communication. At this juncture, foreign language teachers should learn frequently
used emoticons, keyboard symbols, acronyms, grammatical and phonetic symbols and
they should teach them to their students to enable them to establish successful
communication with other people.
Globalization is consolidated by the extraordinary invasion of higher education by new
technologies, especially the Internet. Major changes in the social and economical
conditions in Europe and worldwide force new needs and trends upon the technology.
The main challenge for “the knowledge society of the future” is to ensure that
each member of the society has the opportunity of continuous professional
development, frequent retraining and obtaining new competences, mastering new
information technologies (IT), lifelong learning (LLL), and so on. Within the education
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sector, a number of continuous efforts are taking place to stimulate the use of ICT at all
levels of education.
E-Learning has introduced new approaches of instructional delivery where the roles of
teacher and student have significantly changed. The integration of information and
communication technologies into the education field is in constant progression and
generates empirical approaches for educational environment design. Some research
projects in distance learning are introduced in the world.
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