Klaipėdos universitetas

The greatest achievement of technology, the Internet, not only changed the lifestyles of the world population, but also created unheard of before opportunities for learning and teaching foreign languages. The development of digital technology provided the important shift from the informational Web 1.0 to the social Web 2.0, which allows involving users in active communication and collaboration with each other. The number of social media websites keeps constantly increasing, which makes them available to learners all over the world. The estimated number of social network users worldwide is 1.79 bn. Students’ familiarity with online social media has been reported in this article. The opportunities for applying the Internet websites in active learning / teaching of languages depend to a great extent on what sites learners are accustomed to using and how often. The findings on the use of social media websites are obtained from the survey completed by two samples of students of Klaipeda University. The research reveals that learners use (constantly or often) Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, and Wikipedia. However collaborative editing, social bookmarking, weblogs and conversational sites are never used or even not familiar. The data imply that it is essential to increase learners’ training in application of social sites. Some statistical correlations between the data for both samples have been found by using the Software Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). There is either 99 % or 95 % probability that an observed Pearson’s correlation coefficients are not a chance finding. It means that the findings might be applied beyond the studied samples.

Learning / teaching languages is vital in higher education. There are two main approaches to language teaching, the monolingual and the bilingual. This article aims at examining students’ attitudes to using the mother tongue in learning English for Specific Purposes and analyzing their self-assessments of translating from native language (L1) into English (L2) and vice versa. The respondents in this study are the 1st and 2nd year students of two specializations, Healthcare and Philology at Klaipėda University, and they will need English for their future profession. The analysis of their responses has revealed that all learners need a support of their mother tongue in English classes. The reliability and validity of the findings were checked by applying the SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) and the obtained statistical data imply that conclusions can be extended beyond the relatively small amounts of the respondents’ samples of the current research.