E-learning and Higher Education in the Action Lines of the European Union: Digital and Methodological Competence of the Foreign Language Teacher

Abstract

Teacher training is one of the fundamental aspects for the quality of higher education, an essential tool for innovating teaching methods and, in the case of language teachers, for bringing students closer to the other language and culture. The objective of this research, on the one hand descriptive-analytical and on the other qualitative, is to review the European Union's action line regarding the training requirements, both methodological and digital, of university teachers, and to analyse the e-training courses proposed by German and Spanish universities included in the 2016 Shanghai Ranking, taking into account a set of variables such as the characteristics of the courses and who they are aimed at. Additionally, a survey was conducted among university foreign language teachers, collecting data on the training offered by their university, the integration of ICT in language teaching and its didactic application, as well as the ICT training needs of this group. It is concluded that very few German and Spanish universities - even after the COVID-19 health crisis - design specific courses for the development of the methodological-digital competence of language teachers; most of them are exclusively aimed at the acquisition of digital competences. Another result, extracted from the survey analysis, is that training cannot be standardised, and a specific plan must be developed for each professional group, especially for language teachers due to the uniqueness of each language and culture.