Are you netting the world's best ESL resource?

Age : 34 Joined : 08 Mar 2008 Posts : 1264

[b]If you have access to the Internet, whether for yourself or for your students, you have the world's premier TEFL/TESL resource at your fingertips.

Never before has there been such a bank of EFL material. And it's all there for you, much of it free, accessible, copiable and transmissible.

How can you capitalise on this outstanding resource? That depends to some extent on your Internet connection - whether it's you alone, at home or at school, or some or all of your students, again at home or at school. Beyond that, the possibilities are endless, because the ways in which you can exploit the Internet are limited only by your own imagination. And since your imagination is boundless . . .

But great artists sometimes need a little inspiration. So here are a few kick-starters to get you going.

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Anyone who hasn't been marooned in space for the past sixty months has heard of the two principal Internet tools, Email and the World Wide Web. There are others, like FTP and Telnet, but Email and the WWW are far and away the most used and, for our purposes, probably the most useful.

Email
If you're going to use Electronic Mail to communicate with students, the first thing to do is create mailing lists of your students, grouped in whichever way is most appropriate. Most email programs have an address book that allows you to do this. Once done, you will then be able to email all of your students in a particular group with a single mouse click. You will still, of course, be able to email them individually.

Homework Assignments
There are several ways in which you can distribute homework by email. For example, you could create your own exercises, tests or quizzes, and simply email them to your students. Or you could copy some of the free exercises to be found at sites like English Club and email those. Another possibility is to email students the URL of a site that you want them to work on (see WWW below).

Telephone Lessons
If you teach English by telephone, then email is the perfect way to supply your student with texts to be read before the lesson, with material that you will use during the lesson or with exercises to be done after the lesson.

Newsletter/Newspaper/Magazine
Working together, but not necessarily in the same location, students can write and edit a publication of some kind. This might be a one-off (for example, for a short-term course) or weekly or monthly (for a longer-term course). It could be related specifically to the group or to any other subject of interest to the group. The way you organise this is up to you. You might give each student a different role (editor, advertising manager, journalist etc) or you might let them work in any way they wish. But you should probably set some clear objectives: number of words, editorial/advertising ratio, editorial policy etc.

The beauty of email is that the text can be written, transmitted, rewritten, edited, retransmitted etc easily between any number of students working in any location. Text can be either in the body of the email or attached as a file. Manipulation and correction is particularly easy.

The final product could be published as an email, as a printed document or as a web page. If you have your own home page, or if your school has a web site, it should be a fairly easy matter to publish your students' work. This would give added motivation.

Exchange
There is plenty of scope here to collaborate with students in other schools and other countries. For example, two schools based in France and Japan could create a joint 'Franco-Japanese News'. You would simply need to find teachers abroad who want to work with you. Find them by leaving a message on any of the message boards that you can find at pages like ESL Projects.

The World Wide Web
Here we should distinguish between authentic material (of which there are literally millions of pages) and designed-for-EFL material (which now occupies a significant and growing portion of the Web). Both have their uses.

To get an idea of the range of material available, just take a look at Yahoo!'s main index:

Arts & Humanities
Business & Economy
Computers & Internet
Education
Entertainment
Government
Health
News & Media
Recreation & Sports
Reference
Regional
Science
Social Science
Society & Culture
These are just the main sections. Within each section, there are many sub-sections.

Websites With Authentic Material
The vast majority of websites contain authentic material in the sense that it is written to convey real information (commercial or otherwise) to an English-speaking audience without any thought for non-native speakers. It is a vast range of English from highly formal to familiar or even vulgar. And it emanates from an equally vast range of sources. But it is 'real' English, whether British, American, Australian etc, and whether polished or otherwise. Here, at the click of your mouse, you can find everything from White House Press Briefings to Joe Bloggs' Home Page. And whether it's IBM, Coca-Cola, British Airways, Sanyo or Volkswagen, all the multi-nationals and many other companies can be found on the Web.

You can use this material either as a source for classroom handouts that you would exploit just like any other authentic material, or as an arena for your students themselves to explore.[/b]