E-utopias: Cross-curricular Teaching through Multimedia CD-ROMs in Primary Education

At the beginning of the 21st century computer technology is often used in classrooms to support instruction and foreign language classrooms are no exception. Recently it has also been recognized that learning a foreign language and eventually mastering it is more than acquiring language skills; it is an extremely complicated contextual and social process. The idea that language learning also involves humans relating to one another in effective and productive ways both contextually and socially has become by now dominant over older notions of language as a body of knowledge that can be broken down into smaller pieces – topics, words, grammar rules etc. Teaching methods have also changed accordingly. With an understanding of language as a social and contextual entity, and language learning as a lifelong learning process, language teachers tend to engage their students in special, socially and contextually meaningful activities, providing them with ‘enhanced input ’ (Meskill 2005: 46). In this kind of learning speech, sight, movement, and hearing can unite. _____________________________________________________________________ The Cambridge Dictionary of Computing defines the word ‘multimedia’, as a ‘human