Croatian students' attitudes towards technology usage in teaching Asian languages — A field research

Methodology of foreign language learning in the past 70 years tends to favor the acquisition of skills and know-how tips for the successful application in various social situations. In order to be a well-versed user of a foreign language, it is necessary to learn both grammar and syntax and on the other side, vocabulary. Today's technology enables the usage of different applications in order to achieve the objectives of teaching foreign languages. Thus students have the opportunity to use different applications either (or both) in the classroom in the presence of a teacher, or alone at home as a supplement to the classroom work. As a part of a larger project, supported by European Social Fund, we researched Croatian students' attitudes towards technology usage in learning Asian languages. The research of attitudes is one of several goals important for our project that also includes the development of materials for e-learning, implementation of the e-tools in the classroom, and testing student's improvement in knowledge every three months. This paper deals with the first phase: a field research of students' attitudes. Our goal was to present the state-of-art of the students' self-described knowledge, issues in learning and willingness to use technology in learning. We plan to compare these results to empirical results in later phases of the project. Croatian students (N=203) studding in Zagreb, Rijeka, Varaždin and Split participated in the survey, answering a number of questions on the use of modern technology in Japanese (N = 104), Korean (N = 46), Hindi (N = 32) and Sanskrit (N = 21). They expressed their views on questions related to specific difficulties in learning vocabulary, grammar or writing system of a particular language. They also answered questions about their attitude towards teaching materials such as course books and general attitudes about technology in learning. We used students' feedback into account during the process of developing e-materials for each of the mentioned Asian languages.