Background Reading For IT Workshop

Background Reading For IT Workshop
IT Workshop
A Gumawang Jati, MA
ITB Langue Centre
Email, jati@melsa .net.id
www.lc.itb.ac.id
http://uptitb.tripod.com



General over view

The internet offers many new remarkable facilities and new ways of communication. Yet the speed with which new product, hardware updates and software development are delivered and adapted for use by companies and by individuals means that it’s difficult even for the most committed enthusiast to keep abreast of the market and an eye on the opportunities now emerging.

What’s available?
The internet is dominated by two main activities: first the exchange electronic mail (email) and second, viewing – and sometimes interacting material on the World Wide Web (WWW). Both kinds of Internet use are described here, together with a variety of related activities relevant to ELT.

Teaching and Learning

The resources available in cyber – space are growing daily: so too do the opportunities for ELT professionals in many fields. And, whatever area of ELT business you’re engaged with commercial development, materials creation, publishing, as an agent or provider, teacher, or student – there now exist some exciting opportunities ahead.

Email and newsgroups
Since the late 1980s schools worldwide have used email for international communications activities, ranging from simple pen pal, or rather ‘key pal’ exchanges to full-blown multicultural projects. The attraction of email is simply speed: participants need not wait days or even weeks for a response, but can receive a reply in a matter of hours. Several organization have taken seriously the new demand for key pals. Comenius provides a person-to-person key pal registration on payment of a nominal fee, and other organization offer not only correspondents, but produce reports on projects and suggestions for email takes. Irvine (1994) and Warschauer (1995A) suggest a wide range of email based activities. Elsewhere, schools offering email tutoring are issued with paper-or disk-based materials, and use email to contact their personal tutor for marking, feedback or learner support.
Unlike much of the Web, email is a simple, reliable and proven technology. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has emerged as a viable commercial platform. Most people commented that, for all the bells and whistles of the World Wide Web, it was the simple email massage that they personally found most useful on a day-to-day basis.
Discussion list
Such list have been a constant feature of the academic world, especially in the US, for over a decade, and offer particular advantages to ESL and EFL. Practical, active correspondence with other interested, informed and friendly participants can be of great support and appeal to students and to teachers alike. Unlike a conventional, physical debate, everyone has a chance to state their case. Gender, race, social position and professional status are irrelevant; no individual can ‘shout down’ another; the debate is not constrained by time; and there is an automatic transcript of the proceedings. In addition, list users require no special software beyond email, thus opening participation to a much wider range of participants than any Web-based service. And, perhaps most importantly, many lists are free: set up with a grant from the host University or a third party. Some list use very little human agency. Other lists are moderated, which many support teachers mindful of what material students might access, while lists can be found which offer personal help to users. The work of the moderator, mentor, tutor, or administrator, is sometimes carried out on a voluntary basis, or sometimes managed as a professional, charged for service.

One of the most successful free ELT list, TESL-L, has grown to 25,000 members since it began in the early 1990s. In addition to general ELT issues, it also caters for special interests;

Subgroups include TESLCA-L, for computer assisted language learning, TESUB-L, for job announcements and working conditions, TESLMW-L for material writers, and many more. There are now many hundreds of academic lists, and at least a dozen of relevance to ELT professionals.

Student list
There are no newsgroups solely devoted to ELT. Yet several news groups do carry tropics which may be relevant to English language teachers seeking new resources and materials. One of the most active misc. education. language. English – carries a useful and extensive Frequently Asked Question list related to ESL\EFL.

In principle, newsgroups can be used with classes. Groups of students with particular interests (there are many newsgroups for politics, food, music, or current affairs) could follow discussions for a few days, than post their own massages and await responses. Some groups (e.g. uk.music.folk, or alt.food.wine) are well moderated and even urbane, and a good source of authentic language materials. I myself have triad using `a group` for teaching writing at ITB.

Despite the many advantages of newsgroups, teachers ten to be wary of allowing access to Usenet. Unless the group is carefully chosen, the quality of both language and content can be poor, and sometimes offensive.

Newsgroup represent, much more than the Web, or email, or discussion lists, boot the best and the worst features of the Internet. At their best, they are an excellent source of up-to-date information, ideals and comment, often supplying news before it reaches the mass media. At their worst, they are trivial, tacky or irrelevant; difficult material for a teacher to make good.

Nevertheless, newsgroup continue to enjoy some popularity amongst teachers, especially those who wish to dip into discussions occasionally, rather than be inundated with the email that lists can produce.
Newsgroups can be browsed easily in a way is impossible with lists, and newsreader software allows `threading` to follow discussion topics more easily.

The World Wide Web

The number of ESL and EFL sites on the Web is large, and increases each month. Accurate numbers are impossible to gauge, but an unscientific indication of the growth of materials is the fact that a search for ESL in June 1996 found 60,000 hits; by September 1998, this had increased to over 390,000. From a similar estimation, it is likely that there are between 800 and 1,000 sites now specifically devoted to language learning activities, resources or materials.

In the early years of the Web, most resources for learning, unsurprisingly, were based in the US: colleges and universities there much more likely to have Internet access than their European counterparts, and to have had this access for significantly longer. This situation has changed significantly since the mid 1990s, with sites being established in Japan, Korea, Singapore and Thailand and also throughout Europe.

No comprehensive guide to ELT resources for learning is available, but the Frizzy University Network (FUN) and the Linguistic Fun land give some idea of the range.
The most comprehensive collection is currently at the Internet TESL Journal site, with over 30 categories and over 3,500 entries.

Skills practice on the Web
There are many resources available for teacher, materials, developers and students. Yet, as in any filing cabinet, some resources will prove to be excellent, and others simply out of date and undemanding. I try to map out the resources in simple terms of reading, listening, writing, grammar & reference, and using non ELT resources.

Reading
The amount of purpose written ELT material on the remains small. Impact Online, for example, a joint project of the University of Illinois College of Education and Passport Education Publishing, offer about 20 short texts on currents events, health, and so on, at a sound clip of glossary entries. No materials have been added since March 1995, however: Impact seems to have joined the ranks of ’ghost sites’.

The Comenius Groups has a section called `Fluency Through Fables`, a selection of fables with follow-up multiple choice and 1true or false` exercises. There are only six passages, and each is only two or three short paragraphs in length. (the section was last modified in November 1997.)

In spite of the fact that many sites list `Reading Activities` in their attractively-formatted menus, most ate links to authentic, unmediated resources such as online newspapers or magazines. The extensive listings at the University of Illinois` Division of English as an International Language are a case in point.
Listening
In contrast to the amount of written-ELT material available from the Web, the amount of listening material has grown significantly since 1996.
Rong-Chang Li, at the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, has a section called `Learning Oral English `On Line`, offering seven short elementary dialogues which can be downloaded in the `old-fashioned` way, plus (printed) drills, and a massive (1.2 gigabyte) file on `Health Questions`. Increasingly, however, sites are using multimedia plug-ins. For example:

Bryan Rhodes `Takako’s Great Adventure is Web version of an existing cassette-based set of materials for Intermediate students, and requires Shockwave and Java Script.
Ken Trickel at the University of Florida has set up an ESL Wonderland with activities on Race Relations, the Death Penalty, Alien Abduction etc, using Real Player, chiefly for listening activities, and more recently for watching video (on a 56K or better connection.)
Randall Jones’ Cyber ESL Listening Lab has over 100 listening clips in Real Player format, ranging from short exercises to extended conversations and divided into three levels.

In each case the materials are available because of the enthusiasm of individuals. They are technically interesting, and may suit the needs of some independent learners, but they do not constitute, in themselves, a fully-fledged listening resource.

Writing
Writing is better served on the Web. Purdue University’s ‘On-Line Writing Laboratory’ (OWL) is one of several which provide worksheets and guided writing exercises for students. OWL contains a wide variety of documents, covering punctuation, sentence structure, typical errors, and has extensive examples of native-speaker usage.

Grammars and reference
Several ‘online grammars’ exist on the Web. Hi way offer a rather lightweight grammar aimed at elementary students, while the Digital Educational Network (DEN) has a much more comprehensive offering. (Anthony Hughes’ On-line Grammar won a ‘Best Educational Sites Today’ award from Education World.) Both are paper based grammars which have boon put up onto Web pages, and only a few hyperlinks have been added (to sound files, in DEN’ s case).

An interesting feature of the DEN site is a ‘grammar clinic’, run by Lid bury Business English Center. Users can post questions on usage, to which comprehensive answer are provided. DEN recorded an average of 300 ‘hits’ per month on this section alone in 1998.

Lingua Center, at the University of Illinois, offers an alternative approach, explaining to students how to use the search facilities of the Web to retrieve examples of usage, for example, ‘Hunting nevertheless’ with Web Crawler’. The activities are regularly updated.

Generally, the Web is not a useful source for reference materials such as dictionaries. The Internet TESL Journal site lists over 30, but many of these are arcane (Unofficial Rap Dictionary, Rap Dictionary). Many of the reference works are there because they are out of copyright. Web users, for example, is available online at a number of sites, and some interesting attempts are being made to create dictionaries by Soliciting contributions from Web users.
Yet there are interesting resources available. Word Smyth, a new online dictionary and thesaurus, began in the mid-1980s as work for a Japanese electronics company.
The Collins Co Build Student Dictionary is available online at the Ruhr University, Bochum, as part of a joint project which also provides sounds and pictures to accompany most headwords. And Plum Design’s Visual Thesaurus uses Think Map software to create a visually stunning 3D thesaurus where words, their synonyms, and cognates swirl on the screen in constantly changing display. By and large, however, it is unlikely that publishers will make available high-quality reference work online until solution have been found to the problems of charging and copyright.

Using non-ELT resources
One area which may seem of great value is the great range of authentic material available on the Web. Yet the problem associated with using these wealth of resources are similar to those experienced by teachers who use multimedia encyclopedias and similar resources on CD-ROM. One of the first problems teachers face is that of access-few schools have computer rooms which allow a whole class to access these resources simultaneously.

Another problem is navigation: given the range of the material, how can students be helped to find materials which they can understand and learn from?
There is also the issue of study skills: do students need to acquire a different set of skills in handling screen-based information?

And there is the thorny problem of the nature of the learning that is taking place: are students simply and idly scavenging, or are they acquiring something more useful?
The ability of hypertext to transport the user from clip to clip, from to site is very beguiling.

Yet the richness-and the allure-of material of this sort available on the Web is difficult to exaggerate. Even a small English market town such as Saffron Walden will often turn out to have a significant Web presence, with maps of the region, directories of local shops and businesses, photographs of the town, advertisements, and listings of forthcoming events.

If this were all the Web offered, it would be little more than a convenient meant of retrieving information which would otherwise have to be obtained via the channels teachers have used for years: friends, tourist offices, timetables, travel agents and the like. But the Web offers some very specific opportunities for teachers and learners, not least the fact that it is engaging because it is interactive.

A good Web site, for example, differs significantly from a set of glossy brochures: a Web site can be searched for specific information and the data it provides can be manipulated. The nature of the Web allows people access to other learners and readers, of different status, experiences and responsibilities. On the Saffron Walden Web site, for example, visitors can join discussions on road and traffic problems, or enter the debate on local sports facilities, or can port queries about what commercial services are available. What her they get a response is of course a different question: the point is that the Web has interactivity built into it, in a way that paper-based materials can never have.

The list of non ELT resources of potential interest to teachers is endless. Examples might include:

Drew’s Script-o-Rama, a collection of thousands of down foadable scripts from film and TV programs.

The International Lyrics Server, a searchable database of thousands of song lyrics.

The Corbis Picture Experience, a searchable collection of 1.3 million high quality photographs from the Corbis (Microsoft) collection.

The availability of such resources as these is one thing, but finding them is quite another.
Learning too how to use the Web effectively, incorporation resources into effective tuition and study is one of the skills both the teacher and learner needs to acquire.

Real-time communication

Conventional email, discussion list and newsgroups are examples of deferred, or asynchronous communications. Holding a ‘real’ discussion is impossible: even good systems can delay email transmissions by two to ten minutes, and a massage might occasionally take even longer to arrive. However, the Internet Communication is not restricted to email, there exist a variety of systems which allow users to communicate mere directly, in real time.

Internet Relay Chat
IRC was confined originally to UNIX, and therefore little used in ELT, although the English Language Division of Jalan University, Malaysia, was active as long ago as 1994. One of the teachers commented:

One of the problems with IRC usage is that you might get addicted to it. Just like a real-life conversation, it can be difficult to leave, especially when the topic of conversation interests you. Since the users do not know each other, they might be more open in giving their the opportunity to express themselves freely. (Daud, 1994)

Just as key pals seem to be more popular than pen pals because responses come more quickly, so IRC appears to be extremely appealing to many students. Whet her it is the ‘instant gratification’, or the anonymity, or merely the attraction of a new medium is uncertain; but it is certainly the writer’s experience that some students become fascinated by the simple act of ‘chatting’ around the world.

Web chat
As with other Internet facilities, 'chat' is becoming available via the World Wide Web. A typical example is Acme Web, which gives access to a variety of 'chat rooms' via normal Web pages. The chat pages themselves present the contributions to the discussion in list form. At the bottom of the page, a form is opened in which the user can type in his or her contributions. When the 'Send' button is clicked, the message is sent to the page, which is then refreshed, showing the new contribution at the end.
Chat sites are now widely available on the Web, even from the Yahoo! and Netscape portals. Some are quite respectable- most, however, are unmonitored, and not the sort of environment which is suitable for younger learners.

Dave Sperling's ESL Cafe now has a Chat Room which is policed, and which can be safely visited by students. A clever piece of software also substitutes any four-letter Anglo-Saxon expletive with the word 'love'... Communication of this sort is slow can be tedious, and only just counts as real-time. Yet there is little doubt of the popularity of chat rooms and IRC with some students.

Virtual School
A 'virtual school' might be defined as a 'cyber learning center which offers a full range of English language courses and levels, a diversity of activities, and a learning model which comes close to what is offered at the conventional language school.

There are clearly trends in this direction. The Comenius Group's Virtual English Language Center offers a good range of resources and services, but could not be said to constitute a 'virtual school' in a meaningful sense.

Many sites which appear to be courses or online activities turn out to be using their Web presence only as an advertisement: Rea Life, for example, "the worlds (sic) most innovative and unique English language learning product', is the Web site of a mail-order company offering four audio cassettes.

Those fuuy-fledged virtual universities and colleges who are now established on the Web often offer some sort of accreditation and are linked to 'normal' universities or Higher Education providers.

It seems only a matter of time before similar institutions appear for ELT, indeed, the first incarnations are probably visible at the Englishtown site.
However, at the present time, the virtual school is still one that is very much in development.

Testing via the Web
A good deal of testing practice material is carried on the Web, particularly for TOEIC and TOEFL. The chief change since 1996 has been that sites now permit far greater interactivity, and include a listening component (usually in Real Player format.) The 'TOEFL Prep' page at Okanagan University College in British Columbia, for example, has 520 TOEFL-style multiple choice questions, with fully-commented feedback, three hints for each. It requires Shockwave and JavaScript, and version 4 of Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Searching for English language tests gives a clear indication of the difference between the LTK and US presence on the Web. A simple search for 'TOEFL' on AltaVista, one of the Web's best search engines, came up with over 76,000 pages which mentioned TOEFL. A search with the same engine for 'FCE' found only I 1,000 matches, of which many were not really hits at all (the Foundation For Continuing Education, Future Computing Environments, and Fondo de Culture Economic a, for example.)
Both TOEFL and UCLES are taking seriously the business of Internet-based testing, but neither Organization has yet announced a product.

TOEFL has developed a computer delivered test structured in the same way as the old TOEFL Listening Comprehension, Structure and Written Expression, Reading Comprehension but its content differs significantly, and now includes a typed essay as well as questions exploiting the multimedia capacity of the PC. Some of the test is linear, but portions are now computer adaptive.

The Organization which runs TOEFL, the Educational Testing Service, began computerized testing in July 1998 for examinees in the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and selected countries in Asia. It is anticipated that the current paper test will be completely replaced by the computerized version by the year 200 1. As yet, however, no ET5 tests are yet administered over the Internet.

The ELT Division at UCLES launched its own Web site in October 1998, from where all handbooks, sample papers etc can now be downloaded as PDF files from a single page. UCLES,

like TOEFL, is likely to move in the direction of Internet testing at some point in the future, although no formal plans have yet been announced. As UNCLES' Mikel Vlilanovic points out:

For popular examinations such as FCE, the practical problems of ensuring that enough machines are available for candidates, and the need to ensure that the candidate is in fact who he or she claims to be, mean that the electronic administration of examinations still lies some way in the future.

TOEIC has no online site at the time of writing, although one is scheduled to appear in the near future. The issue of testing is clearly one that is set to change and develop. For those pursuing the area, there is a good range of sources of information about language testing and examination bodies available at the Web site at the University of Surrey.

Is it all really any good ?

Most ELT sites tend to be the product of individual enthusiasts. They are the work of teachers who, for the most laudable of motives, have put up pages of palindromes, or extracts from their students' work, or examples of mazes. They are often interesting to look at, but turn out to be unusable as a resource for students. These 'hobby' sites are sparse in content (though rich in links to other, equally sparse sites) and infrequently updated once the, initial enthusiasm has worn off.

Sources;
www.geocities.com
www.tripod.com
www.comenius.com
www.real.com
www.bbc.co.uk
http://britain.nyc.ny.us
www.macromedia.com
www.2bUs.com
www.izsn.orix/cu/index.html
www.dgjanews.com
www.latrobe.edu.au/www/education/sl/sl.html
www.lniz.uiuc.edu/r-li5/book
www.esl-lab.com
www.webserve.co.uk/clients/saffire
www.script-o-rama.com/index.shtml
www.lyrics.ch/search.html
http:schmooze.hunter.cuny.edu:8888
www.owd.com/realife.html
www.toefl.org,
www.ielts.org
www.toeic.org

References
Daud, Nuraihan Mat (1994)"Internet Relay Chat". CALL Review, November
Graddol, D (1997) The Future of English? London: British Council.
Snookes (1995)'Using the Internet for Interactive Learning". CALL Review, November
Warschauer,M.(Ed.) (1995): Virtual Connections. Hawaii:University of Hawaii.