Uschi Felix, Melbourne
Resources on the World Wide
Web are growing at breakneck speed and at a volume that is beginning to
overwhelm even the keenest of surfers. While the body of materials available
for language learning is relatively small by comparison with other subjects,
two issues are still of concern – duplication and complexity. Effort is being duplicated in a variety of
areas and, as sites multiply, it becomes harder to locate the material that is
both useful and excellent.
This paper summarises the
findings of a four-year survey of approaches to language teaching and learning
via the Web (Felix 1998, 2001). The
pace of development can be seen in the fact that the later publication has
expanded its coverage to include Webquests, collaborative activities, sites for
children, the growing world of publishers' sites and metasites, as well as
software tools and aids to professional development. It has also incorporated the
very large category of English language sites into the main database.
The purpose of
the survey was to find examples of best practice in whole stand-alone courses,
integrated mixed-model courses (Web/CD-ROM/face-to-face), and interactive
exercises for the development of all four skills.
The findings suggest that, in some languages at least, a large number of
excellent resources exist. Even better,
there are enough to make it more economical to integrate the best materials
into existing courses, rather than spend time and money repeating work that has
already been done.
The use of the Web for
language teaching is relatively recent, with the first materials appearing in
the early 90s. The impact, however, has
been considerable, mainly because the technology has advantages over the
previous generation of CALL. It is cheaper
and easier to develop; it is often cheaper and easier to run; and it offers
real possibilities for authentic interaction. Advantages include the ease of
development across platforms, and the availability of free software like
applets, helper applications and plug-ins.
This help extends all the way up to sites that allow non-technophiles to
create respectable interactive exercises.
Prominent among these are:
Hot Potatoes Half-Baked Software http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked
QUIA http://www.quia.com/
Headlines-Makers http://lang.swarthmore.edu/makers/
London Guildhall University Department of Languages http://www.lgu.ac.uk/langstud/call/
WebPractest
http://www.wm.edu/CAS/modlang/gasmit/webpractest/
WELL Language Exercises http://www.well.ac.uk/languageExercises/
In
general, the expertise is available at little or no cost. London
Guildhall University makes a modest charge for a site licence, while Hot Potatoes, which is a commercial
site, makes much of its software available without charge to non-profit
educational institutions. Other sites
like WELL are co-operative ventures,
where the payment for access to the software takes the form of making exercises
based on it available to the whole group.
In similar vein, some sites like QUIA
– which has now introduced a fee-based Premium service offering extra features
- strongly encourage users to post back work for others to use. These sites are
an encouraging example of the potential for worldwide collaboration to develop.
Such collaboration will offset one of the downsides of the increasing ability
to develop materials in-house without excessive reliance on expert help –
namely the proliferation of sites that duplicate the work of others.
As
with all IT solutions, Web delivery has its problems.
• Access is still often unreliable and slow,
especially from modems.
• Some students dislike, and even actively resist,
working with the Web (or any IT), or find the experience isolating.
• The Web is not as well suited to delivery
of sound and video as CD-ROM.
• Oral production skills are seldom supported
meaningfully.
While most of these
problems can be addressed (Felix 2001), others such as time commitment, the
financial return on investment, and administrative concerns continue to weigh
on the Web, as on CALL in general.
Despite
all this, the biggest advantage is perhaps that Web technology offers the
possibility of tailoring an impressive and useful resource at speed and without
the need for much technical expertise. It is becoming easier, for example, to
provide course-specific activities in the shape of Webquests, or through the
use of chats and bulletin boards.
Moreover, it is relatively trouble-free to provide students with access
to extensive material simply by linking to existing sites and thus exploiting
the work of others. It is extraordinary
how generous non-commercial developers can be towards what might in a different
context be seen as theft of intellectual property. Some sites explicitly
authorise exploitation; others welcome links but appreciate the courtesy of
being informed that the link has been established; while others ask that
permission be sought for any copying, including the wholesale copying involved
in mirroring the site. It is obvious that commercial pressures also exist, with
several sites seeking to find ways of generating income to support expensive
development, but, in general the Web is still characterised by a willingness to
allow material to be used at no cost for non-profit educational purposes.
Where
sound is concerned, early delivery was cumbersome and involved frustratingly
slow download times. However, Real Audio is now prevalent and streaming is
commonplace. As a result good quality audio is being provided by a great number
of sites. By contrast, video is still fairly
rare, although the latest streaming technology is encouraging more and more
developers to include short clips, as in Virtual
Wedding http://www.eng.umu.se/vw/Default.htm.
The advantage of streaming audio and sound is that download times are
significantly faster. For more detailed technical information see the excellent
guides by Goodwin-Jones (2000a,b)
In a
site like Global English http://www.globalenglish.com/, we are
also now seeing some experimentation with voice recording through the use of
customised software that can be downloaded by the user. The most exciting
newcomers are voice chats and voice bulletin boards, which are filling the gap
of spoken interaction online. For an
example of this user-friendly technology, see the Wimba site http://www.wimba.com/.
The Web is bewildering
in its variety. Where languages are
concerned, we know that an enormous amount of work is being done to put on to
the Web a wide range of materials, all the way up to whole courses. What we do not know is how to access this
material efficiently.
The problem is first of
all one of size. Exploring any single
site in detail is already time-consuming; exploring all available sites is at
the very least daunting and may be impossible. And that problem grows by the day as sites multiply. This is
happening notably in the major world languages that dominate the teaching system
and the Web, but sometimes even languages of rather low enrolment are not
exempt. What, for example, are we to
make of the fact that at least three different sites teaching the basic
structures of Swahili are simultaneously under construction?
What we see everywhere
on the Web is an ever-expanding multiplication of sites at all levels -
individual exercises, courses of varying ambition, and metasites that seek to
catalogue everything available in any one language or even in all languages
together. Search engines do not provide a great deal of help in this
environment, because the problem is not to locate the myriad of sites
available, but to evaluate them - to discover not only what each does but also
how well it does it.
This
overview cannot be comprehensive but only representative of trends (see Felix
2001 for a more extended list of sites). It would be interesting and
illuminating to provide early and late examples of every activity, as a graphic
demonstration of the improvements that rapidly emerging software has made
possible. The problem here, though, is
locating early examples. Sites that
remain active naturally tend to change with the technology, and their more
primitive first forms disappear from the Web. This means that early experiments
may be visible only on fossilised sites on which development has stopped. But fossilised sites do not necessarily
remain on the Web, so the historical record tends to disappear from the virtual
world.
While German examples
are included in each section, what follows is a broadly categorised overview of
how the Web is being used for CALL. It
covers a range of languages, because it is often useful to look at work that is
being done in other languages (or even other subjects) before embarking on
curriculum development. Visiting a variety of sites in languages other than the
one that is our focus may provide an insight into different approaches, and
stimulate ideas well beyond our own socio-cultural boundaries.
The
earliest materials took the form of textbooks on the Web, grammar exercises,
and large and ever growing collections of materials, often without much
structure to guide the uninitiated user. They have all undergone continuous
change. Examples are Gary Smith’s German
Electronic Textbook http://www.wm.edu/CAS/modlang/grammnu.html and the Bucknell
Russian Program http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/index.html
These divide into two
major groups – commercial and non-commercial.
Given the costs of developing and maintaining a large course on the Web,
the drive to earn an income is understandable.
Apart from anything else, if evaluation is not entirely computer-based,
how are the teachers to be paid? The
same question applies to any human interaction – by e-mail or, particularly, by
voice – that the students might be given.
Substantial human resources are needed to support major sites, and it is
extremely unlikely that they can be provided without cost for any length of
time.
Not surprisingly,
therefore, a lot of the stand-alone courses on the Web are fee-paying and
password protected, though some also offer free materials, in the shape either
of an initial example lesson to show prospective students what the course is
like, or of extra-curricular material like games. The sites cover a wide range, from one person operations Interdeutsch http://www.interdeutsch.de and Cyberitalian http://cyberitalian.com, to small team enterprises like Texthaus http://www.texthaus.com/and
EuroDeutsch Online http://www.biblia.it/austria/, and all the way up
to large organisations like the Centro
Virtual Cervantes http://cvc.cervantes.es/portada.htm,
which has ambitions to set up an unusually extensive set of fee-paying
Web-based language courses, or GlobalEnglish
http://www.globalenglish.com which
employs considerable staff and offers a 24 hour attended chat site and other
extensive services. This latter site is an excellent one to keep in view, since
it is technically competent and tends to be an early adopter of advances in the
technology. Its quality may be an
illustration of the fact that successful commercial sites that generate enough
income to support development are most likely to be in the vanguard (this point
is often made about the technical expertise embedded in pornography
sites).
One of the most attractive courses
on the Web, which is distinguished by its imaginative use of graphics, is Lina und Leo http://www.goethe.de/z/50/linaleo/mainmen2.htm/.
Other substantial free courses in German include LernNetz http://www.skolinternet.telia.se/TIS/tyska/
and pioneer Peter Gölz’ German for travellers
http://web.uvic.ca/pgolz-gft/. This latter has a rather misleading name,
since it is of wider interest than the run of courses on the Web for tourists,
and earlier names like German for
beginners or Deutsch online look
more appropriate. The course is of
interest, however, as an illustration of the journey that a University-based
pioneer has followed in moving out into the more commercial world. Gölz is one
of those developers who does not charge fees, but is attempting to generate an
income by other means, like an on-line shop and advertising.
There are a multiplicity
of grammar exercises on the Web, most of them using multiple choice questions
or fill-ins, usually but not always in the context of a whole sentence. Some are an integral part of a structured
course. Occasionally, this is a
Web-based course, with exercises linked to pages that explain the structures. More often the exercises supplement an
off-line course, and may be linked directly to specific textbooks. This is
understandably the case with the rapidly growing publishers' sites set up to
support the books they are selling (see below).
For examples in German,
see the German
Electronic Textbook and Studienbibliothek http://www.interdeutsch.de/studien1.htm which is an open access collection of exercises attached
to Interdeutsch. Good examples of extensive structured sets of
grammar exercises that can be worked
through sequentially can be found in both the French and Spanish sites of the
University of Texas at Austin http://www.lamc.utexas.edu/fr/home.html
and http://www2.sp.utexas.edu/SP506/student.qry/.
All exercises in both languages follow the same pattern, so the student has to
learn only one set of conventions to navigate around the site. Even after 4 years, the French course
remains a good example of user-friendliness in the way that materials are used
both on- and off-line. Equally impressive are the very attractive exercises
compiled by the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG) http://www.aatg.org/teaching_resources/vol_1-2/web_exercises/index.html.
Grammar exercises are also available
in more or less unstructured heaps with the user left to pick out the bits that
will be helpful without much in the way of guidance. French Grammar Central, for example, http://globegate.utm.edu/french/globegate_mirror/gramm.html draws on over
400 sites from across the Web, and sorts the material only roughly into 12 very
general categories like Adjectives, Articles and Determiners. One drawback to
these collections - which is also potentially the drawback to using the work of
others in any course - is that approaches will almost inevitably vary, so that
users have to get used to different ways of using the material. This may not be a great problem, but it is a
distraction nonetheless. Ideally,
material would be presented in one way that students can quickly get used to. A
similar site for German does not seem to exist, but it would be easy enough to
create – even if excellence and a high level of student-friendliness would
require a great deal of work on the part of the compiler.
There are a variety of
ready-made templates to choose from for the creation of quizzes and games
online. For example, Hot Potatoes offers six applications for the creation of
interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, matching/ordering,
crossword and gap-fill exercises for the Web, while Headlines-Makers offers Cloze tests; two column matching, and
matching with drag and drop; multiple choice including true/false; ordering
scrambled sentences; and a memory game with tiles.
Similarly, the
user-friendly and extensive Quia is
an excellent source both for developers and for users, with templates that
allow games and quizzes to be created very quickly in many languages. Students can then access the material and
the site will keep global statistics on performance. Of the more than 600,00
activities that are freely available, some 700 are available in 31 language
categories. The great majority of the
work so far has been done in French and Spanish, with fewer exercises available
in German (74 at the end of October, compared to 245 in French and 218 in
Spanish), but this is a site that is destined to grow inexorably as it calls on
the services of creators worldwide.
Webquests constitute one
of the most rapidly developing areas in Web teaching. Originally, the work took the form of task-based activities like those in
German Internet
Chronicles
http://www.uncg.edu/~lixlpurc/GIP/german_units/UnitsCover.html/, where
students were given a task to carry out which involved accessing relevant
German Web sites, compiling information on a specific topic, and giving answers
to questions. At this early stage, a
set of questions might be presented on-screen, but there was no facility for
answering them on-screen, nor for sending the answers electronically to the
tutor. Both these features are now
standard across the Web, again most successfully demonstrated in the AATG
collection http://www.aatg.org/teaching_resources/vol_1-2/web_activities/index.htm.
Since the early days,
activities have shifted to elaborate information gap exercises like Dream Holiday http://home.vicnet.net.au/~flemrw/dreamholiday/,
problem-solving ventures such as Travelsim
http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/travelsim/,
or quests linked to specific events such as Eddie
and Spike's Great Virtual Olympic Adventure http://www.schools.nt.edu.au/olsu/olyadvent/menu.htm.
For an illuminating introduction to
the whole area, and an excellent source of ideas in a variety of subjects, see A WebQuest about WebQuests http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/webquestwebquest-hs.html.
This is another of the
fastest growing areas with publishers like Heinle & Heinle http://www.heinle.com/sites.html/, Prentice Hall http://www.prenhall.com/pubguide/index.html/, and Harcourt College Publishers http://www.harcourtcollege.com/worldlanguages/ providing a large variety of supplementary
materials geared to their textbooks.
Some of the material is grammatical, but task-based activities have
become increasingly common. These range from the early simple on screen pro-formas for
printing out, to more recent developments allowing for on-screen emailing to
the tutor, to online animated problem-solving activities created with
Macromedia Flash as in the BBC's Spywatch
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/lookandread/. The latter is one of the best examples so
far of how animation rather than video can be used to great effect. A common feature of sites is the provision
of resources for teachers. In the case
of Prentice Hall, its Lehrerecke is a
collection of Weblinks that might be of interest to teachers. Harcourt adds a
bulletin board for teachers.
Rather surprisingly, German
textbooks are not yet common in these publishers’ lists, falling a long way
behind not only the obvious Spanish, but also ESL, French and Italian. Heinle & Heinle has no German sites,
while Prentice Hall and Harcourt offer one each: Treffpunkt http://cw.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/widmaier/
and Wie Geht’s http://www.harcourtcollege.com/german/sevin/. Since all publish many more German
textbooks than this, perhaps it is just a matter of time before more Websites
are created. For example, Harcourt
claims that there are Web resources available for Deutsch im Berufsalltag, but they are not accessible to all in the
way that at least some of Wie Geht’s
materials are.
Collections
of resources have perhaps been the fastest growing area on the Web, with many
sites including at least a limited collection of links that the developers have
thought useful (the Goethe Institut http://www.goethe.de/ is an example with categories like Deutsch lernen und lehren). As a result, enormous duplication is being
generated. If there is a problem here,
it is that it is relatively easy to build up comprehensive collections, but
very difficult and time-consuming to create select collections that are well
structured and well indexed.
Comprehensive
collections include The Language Hub:
Worldwide resources for Languages (164 languages) http://www.cetrodftt.com/, and the Human Languages Page (over 200 languages
and over 1900 links) which has now been renamed I love languages http://www.ilovelanguages.com/ .
Naturally, the larger
the collection, the less user-friendly it risks becoming, and well structured
single language sites might seem more helpful to users with limited time on
their hands. Examples in French are the pioneering Tennessee Bob’s Famous French Links http://www.utm.edu/departments/french/french.html, and ClicNet http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/clicnet/index.html,
while English is served by the Internet
TESL Journal: TESL Links http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/links/.
However, with TennesseeBob claiming
over 10000 links, Clicnet over 3000
and the TESL Journal over 6000, the
structural problem has clearly not been overcome even in these more tightly
focussed sites. Faced with such
mountains of data, there is going to be a strong temptation to turn, instead,
to sites that provide selections of links of varying sizes as part of their
comprehensive menu of services.
However, this does mean taking the quality of the selection on trust -
and not all sites might deserve that trust. To ask the critical question - is
the selection a distillation of thousands of hours spent searching a much
larger number of sites, or is it merely the result of chance encounters and
recommendations from others?
Connecting students to
authentic environments is getting easier and more user-friendly with threaded
discussion groups becoming very popular, some of them now including sound (see Wimba above). Early Chats, MUSHES and
MOOs tended to be very daunting text-based environments, but some pioneers got
good results nevertheless (see Warschauer 1995, 1996). Strictly speaking, these developments used
the Internet and predate the Web by a decade.
Still, the boundary between the Web and the Internet is increasingly
blurred, and, in any case, Websites now routinely include Chat and e-mail in
what they offer. Both Interdeutsch and Texthaus, for example, rely heavily on communication of this sort.
Novices who want to
familiarise themselves with the concept of a MOO are recommended to take the
tour of Romantic circles http://www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/, which is
a user-friendly site devoted to the study of Romantic literature and
culture. For a German site, see Morgengrauen http://mg.mud.de/online/.
The environment has
progressed tremendously in recent years with students being able to create
their own three-dimensional characters through which to communicate as in Active Worlds http://www.activeworlds.com/. There are also now examples of entire
collaborative courses run in several locations via Active Worlds Educational Solutions http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/. Only two German participants are listed - Fachhochschule Kaiserslautern Standort Zweibrücken, and
Fachochschule Esslingen, Hochschule für Socialwesen – but the list of
educational institutions involved from around the world is already impressive.
One of the best examples of the use
of the Active Worlds software is Virtual
Wedding where
students construct their own ‘city’ environments in the context of ‘marrying’
language, literature and culture. This
is one of the most successful examples so far of involving students in
collaborative work based on constructivist theory. An attractive touch is provided by the video clips in which
students describe the projects on the basis of their own experience.
These sites exist
for various professional purposes:
• Dissemination of information, exchanges of ideas
and discussions, as in WELL http://www.well.ac.uk/
, or Tapped in http://www.tappedin.org/.
• Training, as in ICT4LT http://www.ict4lt.org/en/index.htm.
• The provision of technical information as in Language Interactive http://www.fln.vcu.edu/cgi/interact.html
.
• The provision of a shared teaching and learning
space for teams of students and teachers as in Thinkquest http://www.thinkquest.org/.
As well as these, there
are plenty of general sites which provide more or less complex services geared
to teachers. For example, publishers’
sites in particular often include a section for teachers.
The Web lends itself
perfectly to co-operative and collaborative activities. These may be confined to students enrolled
in the course, with the final goal often being to publish the work produced
online. One excellent example is Project-driven
Foreign Language Learning http://www.glen.hlc.unimelb.edu.au/glen/hll/,
which integrates multimedia tools into the projects and where students share
the outcomes of their work with worldwide audiences by publishing on the Web.
See also "Österreichbilder" Ein
StudentInnenprojekt, das verschiedene Fenster nach Österreich öffnet
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/german/austria_centre/student_project_2000_prelim/austria.htm/.
More widely, in one of
the enriching examples of globalisation, co-operation can take place between
students who might not only be enrolled in different institutions, but located
in different countries. An example of an activity that brings students together
in this way is Odyssee - a Net game by
e-mail http://www.goethe.de/oe/mos/odyssee/deindex.htm/.
Another form of creative
cooperation can be seen in the magazines on the Web, which are often included
as one part of a comprehensive site.
Some restrict themselves to publishing material for the users to read,
others, like Deutsch lernen mit Jetzt
online http://www.goethe.de/z/jetzt or Pizzaz! http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~leslieob/pizzaz.html
go further and provide an opportunity for the subscribers themselves to write
material for posting on the site.
A more complex development is
represented by JarpTown http://elicos.qut.edu.au/village/default.htm/.
This is a creative writing experiment in which a group of ESL students
have developed a variety of characters which then interact in a village
environment built in the cyber community Connections.
The results of these interactions are then turned into narrative writings and
posted back on the Web. As the project progresses, the hope is that readers
will be able to walk into the community and join in the narratives.
Materials for children
have only started to appear systematically during the last two years. While
they are specifically designed for younger audiences, they still offer a wealth
of fun activities for learners of any age and provide rich sources of materials
around which teachers can construct creative language learning activities.
While levels of interaction vary, it is noticeable how strong an emphasis many
of these sites place on getting children involved in a whole range of
activities, including writing material that is posted on the site.
Not unexpectedly, many
sites are now being devoted to popular books - and not only contemporary hits
like Harry Potter but also the classics of Lewis Carroll, the creations of Dr
Seuss http://www.randomhouse.com/seussville
and C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia http://www.narnia.com/index_01.html. Many of these sites are fanzines, but there
are official sites supported by the publishers that can be expected to have a
commercial focus and to provide opportunities to buy. Similar ports of call for
children who are already reading the texts can be found in many languages, such
as sites for Astérix, Le Petit Prince and Tintin in French.
The point of these sites
is that they are directed explicitly to children. To take the obvious German example of Grimm’s fairy tales, it is
possible to find the texts themselves in the Gutenberg project http://gutenberg.aol.de/index.htm/
but the site is not pitched at children. Similarly, children might enjoy
the work that Robert Goodwin-Jones has done in
building up a beautifully illustrated library of stories, in German and English
translation, some with quizzes attached, http://www.fln.vcu.edu/menu.html/,
but the site is meant for University students. There are also sites maintained
by fans that are devoted to non-German subjects like Harry Potter, and that
offer information, discussion groups, chats, quizzes, games and collections of
links to other Potter sites. A useful entry to the field is http://www.phoenixfeder.de/.
For a German example of
a publisher’s site which offers a small number of activities for children in
addition to the advertising material, see Egmont Franz Schneider Verlag http://schneiderbuch.funonline.de/.
Television and film
provide the inspiration for other children's sites. The BBC has an extensive
site Littlekids http://www.bbc.co.uk/littlekids/,
as does the ABC, while Disney and Sesame Street are famous names with a Web
presence.
A delightful aspect of
many sites is their feel for children, as well as the beautiful colour graphics
used. Perhaps understandably, it often
feels that greater creative energy has gone into children's sites than into any
other category. Excellent examples are Die
Blinde Kuh http://www.blinde-kuh.de/
and Sowieso - Die on-line Zeitung für
junger Leser http://www.sowieso.de/,
and the French sites L'Escale http://www.lescale.net/ and Premiers pas sur Internet, ou L'Internet
pour enfants http://www.momes.net/. At
the most sophisticated end, ESL teachers might direct computer literate
students to the amazing adventure-game oriented Majestic site http://www.majestic.ea.com/.
For a multi-lingual site
that claims users in 137 countries from all around the world, and brings
together a large number of mailing lists and real-time interactions like Chats,
see Kidlink http://www.kidlink.org/. One of the 20 languages listed is German.
Technology,
ideas and implementations are changing too rapidly for it yet to be possible to
provide a definitive picture of the pedagogy that underpins CALL on the
Web. It is easy to see, though, whether
individual developments have been driven by technicians, or by teachers, or by
a team of instructional designers with expertise in IT, graphics and pedagogy.
Excellent things are being done, especially through
synchronous and asynchronous forums like discussion groups, bulletin boards,
Chats and MOOs. The Web provides
wonderful potential for creative teachers to motivate students and keep them
interested. Individual practitioners
are using different combinations of approaches in a variety of ways. Included among these are hybrid approaches
designed to avoid potential problems on the Web, which might take the form of
downloading activities from the Web on to a self-contained Intranet, or of
integrating CD-ROMs and the Web, or of running audio and video conferencing
along with Web activities.
Pedagogical
approaches adopted online vary greatly from traditional grammar-based teaching
to innovative goal-oriented quests, with the former still dominant, if not as
overwhelmingly as in the early years. A move towards constructivist approaches
can be observed, and is explicitly present in, for example, Euro Deutsch Online (Pfeiffer 2001).
As a
perhaps significant example of the change that is taking place, there are
publishers' sites in which Webquests are the only form of activity supported
for some of their textbooks. However, it can be difficult to determine what the
overall teaching approach of any site is, since what is freely accessible on
the Web is often only part of a larger package that also includes face-to-face
teaching. More importantly, student interactions - with the materials, or each
other, or the teacher - will never be visible to the casual visitor, even
though these are critical to the pedagogical success of any site.
Nevertheless,
while the Web is providing an increasingly rich shared free resource to CALL
practitioners, the often alluded to 'radical rethinking' of the teaching
approach still has a long way to go.
The goal remains to use the Web for meaningful, realistic activities, to
rethink the teaching approach, and to exploit the various communication
resources available in the most motivating way possible.
What the survey of the
Web makes clear is that a lot of excellent resources are available to support
languages. It may not be true yet that
we can simply log on to the Web to learn any language that we choose, or even
the half dozen or so major languages.
What is more, it may never be true, if only because learning a language
in that isolated context is a very big challenge. All the same, the Web already offers a wide range of materials to
support language learning, including learning in the classroom, along with a
variety of models from which teachers will be able to profit when thinking
about how they want to exploit what is there.
One problem
with the material is duplication. This adds to the difficulty of identifying
centres of excellence, but also represents a sad waste of scarce expertise
and time. It would be much more sensible to embrace a
co-operative model which would invest the scarce commodity of time in producing
a range of materials that would complement each other. However, the fate of good advice is often to
be ignored and the difficulties of getting people to work together - even
within the same institution! - cannot be under-estimated. Apart from anything else, co-operation sits
uneasily in a system characterised by competition, and the issue of copyright
and intellectual property poses a threat that it would be unwise to ignore,
however generous the spirit of co-operation has been so far.
It
is unlikely, therefore, that the other big problem - how we can make an
informed selection among everything that is on offer - will ever go away. Publishing a survey of sites is a first step
towards developing a critical guide that will map the territory and save wasted
hours of search time. However, since
the Web is evolving so rapidly, with new sites appearing all the time and old
ones occasionally disappearing, it might be thought that any such guide will
date rapidly. That is true, but only
partly so. Work that has been done on
substantial sites that are on-going - and sites linked to University courses
are unlikely to disappear overnight - will continue to be valid. All the same, an eye needs to be kept on
them in case they change radically, and attention has to be paid to newcomers,
so the material needs to be updated regularly if it is to continue to be useful. Finding the resources to do this useful
work, on the other hand, will continue to be a challenge.
Felix,
U. (1998). Virtual Language Learning: Finding the Gems
Amongst the Pebbles, Melbourne: Language Australia.
Felix,
U. (2001). Beyond Babel: Language Learning Online.
Melbourne: Language Australia Ltd.
http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~ufelix/babel.shtml
Goodwin-Jones,
B. (2000a). Emerging Technologies: Literacies and Technology Tools/Trends,
Language Learning & Technology, 4 (2),
11-18.
Goodwin-Jones,
B. (2000b) "Language interactive: A Trailguide to Creating Dynamic Web
Pages". http://www.fln.vcu.edu/cgi/interact.html
Pfeiffer,
H. (2001) “Fremdsprachen lernen nur mit dem Internet? Anmerkungen zum Projekt
Euro Deutsch Online”, TELL & CALL, 30-35.
Warschauer,
M. (1995). Virtual Connections: Online Activities and projects for Networking Language
Learners, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.
Warschauer,
M. (1996). “Computer-mediated Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice”, Modern Language Journal, 18 (4), 470-481.
Biodata
Professor
Dr. Uschi Felix is Director of Information Technology Research and Development
and a member of the German department in the Faculty of Arts at Monash
University in Melbourne. She has a research background in applied linguistics,
and during the last decade her work has focussed on CALL in all its various
aspects, concentrating on the systematic integration into the curriculum of
tested CALL applications from stand-alone software to WWW sites. She has
contributed to the development of multi-media software and Websites in several
languages. Her publications include many articles on the use of technology in
language teaching as well as the book Virtual
Language Learning: Finding the Gems among the Pebbles.