ELT on the NET
The Internet In English Language Teaching (including report on the first Virtual Classroom trial)
Paper presented at ATESOL Conference
Sydney, January 1997
Contents
- The Net in Language Teaching
- Virtual Classroom (First Trial)
- A Look to the Future
- Conclusion - Some key issues to consider
Well before most us come to the end of our working lives use of the Internet and World Wide Web in education will be standard practice.
Students will be able to choose from an almost infinite variety of learning options emanating from many different countries and institutions. It will be possible to take an informal short course on a subject of particular interest or study for a degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the world without ever leaving home.
The provision of courses will not be constrained by time-zones, nor the size of buildings or even countries. The physical locations of students and teachers will be of little concern. Educational courses in the virtual world will be accessible from anywhere 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Teaching materials may be delivered on-line, through the post and/or via broadcast television, depending on the requirements of the course and needs of the students. All course work, however, will be undertaken on computers connected to the internet.
The Net in Language Teaching
For the last few months Jonathan Clemens and I have been using our company web site ('Highway ELT') to trial the use of the internet in English language teaching. Before describing the first trial of our Virtual Classroom project, I would like to outline a few other ways the net is used in language teaching.
TESL-L and Listservs
The story of English language teaching and the internet has to start with TESL-L, which was founded in 1991 by Anthea Tillyer.
TESL-L is an electronic forum run by the City University of New York and Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan. Currently more than 11,000 teachers from around the world use this free service to meet and exchange ideas on a range of topics related to the teaching of English as second or foreign language.
Technically, TESL-L and similar services use an e-mail discussion list to store the names and e-mail addresses of the participants. Participants e-mail their contributions to the service, which automatically distributes them to every other participant. Discussion lists like this are sometimes called 'listservs', a name derived from one of the pieces of software commonly used in the process.
TESL-L, with its archives and various specialist discussion forums, is a remarkable source of information. It is akin to joining the largest and probably one of the friendliest staffrooms of language teachers imaginable.
For example, on November 28 1996 Lola Katz sent in a message seeking clarification on the use of Ms in spoken language. Over the next week 19 detailed responses were posted, covering every aspect of the subject from the use of Ms in a range of different countries and cultures to "Ms and the schwa".
At the same time there were 8 contributions to a continuing discussion about using pop songs in the classroom. These contained suggested activities and canvassed the issue of copyright. There were also postings on many other subjects, including perennials like the value of authentic versus non-authentic texts and the question of whether too little or too much grammar is taught. A first time contributor from Sweden got help with teaching pronunciation; someone from Hawaii was seeking opinions of a new edition of a text; someone using 'Animal Farm' as a reading text was looking for ideas for activities; the results of a recent survey on the importance of fostering skimming and scanning skills were posted and responses to a new survey on lesbian and gay issues in ESL and EFL teaching were sought.
Whatever you need to know about language teaching, there is probably someone on TESL-L who can provide the answer. If not, there are plenty of other 'listservs' where issues relating to language teaching and learning are discussed.
Writing
The demands and needs of internet users are, I believe, leading to a divergence of writing styles. The written forms used in web pages and formal communication are very similar to those used in real-world texts such as business letters, brochures and advertisements. The vast majority of e-mail messages, however, are written in a very informal form of English.
This new language of e-mail is evolving before our eyes, so to speak. It is in response to the demand by Internet users for a quick, spontaneous form of communication and is more like spoken, rather than written, English. It ignores many of the rules of grammar and makes use of an ever increasing and imaginative range of abbreviations. Symbols called 'smileys' are often combined with written text to communicate feelings or emotions.
An increasing number of teachers are using the internet to help students improve their communicative skills. Some teachers, for example, are using e-mail for everyday communication with their students and are asking their students to use e-mail to send in drafts of formal writing exercises for comment and correction. Many of these teachers have reported that students who are reluctant to express themselves verbally are often the most active participants in these exchanges and, thus, gain the most benefit from this use of e-mail.
In addition to e-mail, teachers and students are making more and more use of the WWW to publish material quickly and cheaply for a potential audience of millions.
Colin Oriti from New South Wales Adult Migrant English Service in Australia, for example, is using the web in an interesting writing project called 'Write Away', which presents students' articles and stories in the electronic equivalent of a high quality magazine. The 'Write Away' site also offers advice and assistance to those who would like to write but don't know how to start and provides access to information about immigration and welfare issues in Australia.
Shared Projects
English language teachers and students in different countries are using the internet to work together on projects. Students access the vast resources of the WWW for their research and use e-mail to share and discuss their findings and cooperatively complete the task.
One of the best examples of using of the internet in this way is the ongoing 'Email Project' run by Ruth Vilmi from Helsinki University of Technology Language Centre. The project, which started in 1993, brings together students from universities in Asia, Europe and North America to share their insights and assist each other's writing on a wide selection of topics.
In 1994-95 for example, advanced English language students from Finland, Hong Kong, Korea, France, Norway and the USA worked together on an international environmental project. They used the WWW to research the topic, then jointly prepared letters, documents and technical reports. Shared projects like this are clearly a great way of promoting and facilitating cross-cultural exchanges between language learners around the world.
KEY-PALS and CHAT-SL
Long before silicon chips and floppy disks were dreamed of, young people from different countries corresponded as pen-friends to practise their language skills and learn more about each other's countries and cultures. As the internet expanded, e-mail became an obvious and attractive means of communication between 'key-pals' (in net-speak - US dialect, of course).
There are also a number of e-mail discussion lists for English language students that operate in a similar way to the TESL-L list for teachers. Probably the two best known are Dave's ESL Cafe, a private service run by Dave Sperling from Los Angeles, and the various SL lists owned and operated by La Trobe University in Australia and Kyoto Sangyo University in Japan.
Virtual Classroom - Introduction
Before Jonathan Clemens and I started developing the Virtual Classroom we spent some time surfing the net l ooking at sites concerned with language teaching. We also monitored several student lists to get a feel for how many English language students were using the internet and for what purposes.
As far as we could see, the most popular discussion lists with EFL and ESL learners were the SL lists from La Trobe University which received more than 100 contributions on some days. Although we saw a lot of e-mail traffic on student discussion lists, there did not appear to be a high degree of communication or interaction between the participants. An occasional topic would catch the interest of subscribers and would be discussed over a few days but most contributions seemed to fall into the category of, "Hi my name is Raoul. I am 19 and I live in Sao Paulo. I would like to write to a pretty girl in America."
Most messages of this ilk, no doubt sent out into cyberspace with hope and anticipation, generated very little, if any, response. I am certain, however, that if a Linda from LA put out a similar message, the Inbox on her computer would overflow! Cyberspace is still a male dominated domain although, thankfully, the situation is improving.
Creating The Environment
The aim of the Virtual Classroom project is to explore the possibility of using the Internet and World Wide Web to create an environment that will help stimulate purposeful communication between English language learners across the globe.
In the real-world, language teaching is becoming increasingly concerned with giving students the ability to use their new language spontaneously to express their thoughts needs and desires. Within the classroom context, the process is greatly enhanced when the provision of new language skills occurs in a supportive environment that allows these new skills to develop though use and experimentation.
In the Virtual Classroom we are attempting to replicate the shared and supportive environment of a real-world class. As a starting point we felt that it was necessary for all the participants in the Virtual Classroom to be using the same course materials, since this would provide them with some common ground regardless of their geographic distance from each other.
The published core materials are supplemented by extra activities obtained from the internet. These activities are designed to stimulate discussion (and e-mail exchanges) on a range of issues.
Core Material - 'Words Will Travel
The core course material for the Virtual Classroom is Level 1 of 'Words Will Travel', a video-based communicative English language teaching course. This intermediate level course is currently used throughout Australia and in Japan, Indonesia and New Zealand.
One of the main reasons for the great success of 'Words Will Travel' in the classroom is the way the video drama creates for teachers and students the shared context necessary for purposeful and meaningful communication. In the Virtual Classroom we aimed to take this shared context beyond the walls of individual classrooms and into cyberspace.
As well as having confidence in the quality of 'Words Will Travel', there are several practical reasons for choosing the material. As the publisher of 'Words Will Travel' we were able to make whatever changes we felt were necessary without breaching copyright. We were also able to supply the teaching materials, including the video, free of charge to classes participating in the first phase of the trial. Had we used another video-based course, such as 'Lost Secrets', the costs involved in running the trial would have been considerably higher.
Design Of New Materials
Twenty-eight new activities were prepared for the Virtual Classroom, drawing on the context provided by the 'Words Will Travel' video drama and accompanying audio and print materials. Broadly speaking, the Virtual Classroom activities fall into five categories.
1. Getting to Know You
The first activity in Unit 1, 'Our Class', requires students in each of the participating classes to survey each other and prepare a profile of the class. In a later activity, 'Holiday Destinations', students exchange information about the tourist attractions of the town or city in which they live.
We included these activities so that participating classes would have easy access to information about each other. We hoped that this early exchange of information would help develop a collegiate environment in the Virtual Classroom.
2. Extension of core class work
Many of the activities in the Virtual Classroom extend the existing core classroom activities. For example, the video drama in 'Words Will Travel' is set in a small country hotel called 'Treetops', which is owned and operated by June Wilson. From the video and print material students know that eight years earlier June Wilson's father and husband went fishing together in a small boat but did not return. Neither the boat nor bodies were ever found.
Students speculate in their real-world class about what might have happened to the men. The teacher then posts their opinion(s) in the Virtual Classroom, together with any responses they may have to the postings of other classes .
The answer to the riddle of what happened to the men can only be found in the Virtual Classroom. In an 'information gap' activity two classes are matched and each is sent a different cloze passage of the story, 'What the Seabirds Saw'. The information missing in one cloze passage can be found in the other. In order to complete the cloze, each class must formulate questions to ask their partner class. Classes send their questions and answers directly to each other by e-mail.
3. 'What's Your Opinion'
Each unit contains an activity entitled 'What's Your Opinion'. The object of these activities is to explore the potential of the Virtual Classroom as a forum for free exchange of student opinions. Rather than setting specific tasks, each of these activities offers several controversial statements relating to the unit being studied. Teachers are asked to encourage their students to discuss the statements, formulate and post opinions and compare them with the opinions of other classes.
The aim is to encourage students to create 'threads'. After making their initial contribution, they can monitor and make further contributions as the "threads" of discussion evolve. During the discussions we asked teachers to take a back-seat role.
4. Exploration of cross-cultural issues
Many of the activities in the Virtual Classroom allow for cross-cultural comparisons on a range of issues, including the use of titles and nick-names, giving advice and compliments, crime and punishment, and even food and cooking.
In Unit 4 the activity 'Are They Polite?', for example, allows students to compare what constitutes polite and impolite behaviour in different societies. After undertaking a series of activities in the core material concerned with levels of politeness in an English-speaking country, students look again at several scenes in the video and decide whether they think the behaviour of particular characters would be considered polite or impolite in their own countries. Their decisions and the reasons for them are posted in the 'Virtual Classroom', where they can also read and compare postings from other classes.
5. 'Any Questions'
Finally, there is an opportunity for students to raise any questions and problems they may have encountered in the unit they have just completed with other participants in the Virtual Classroom. The aim of these activities is to encourage students to use each other as a resource, so we suggest that students try to answer the questions raised by their virtual-classmates wherever possible.
Classes
The Virtual Classroom trial was designed to build on the curriculum and normal teaching routine of participating classes. For this reason we decided interchanges should be on a class to class (rather than an individual student to student) basis, with each class teacher acting as the mediator between the students in their real-world class and the activity in the Virtual Classroom.
Teachers printed out Virtual Classroom activities from the website for their classes. Students then worked through an activity and the teacher sent in their responses via a standardised electronic form. We then posted the responses to the Active Classroom page of the website. Teachers also printed out the contributions from other classes for their students to discuss and comment on.
In order to ameliorate the problem of restricted individual student access to the Virtual Classroom, we offered to pass on e-mail addresses so that students could contact each other directly. We also included in the Virtual Classroom a variety of open-ended activities and joint activities to provide the stimulus and basis for direct exchanges between participating classes and students. We hoped that after establishing contact through work on shared activities, individual students in different classes would seek each other out to exchange ideas, firstly about core course activities and later about more general issues that arose.
It was our aim to involve up to eight EFL and ESL classes from a number of different countries in the initial phase of the trial, which started in October 1996. During our search we contacted a number of teachers who were familiar with 'Words Will Travel' and invited them to become involved. We also sent a request for participants through TESL-L. This generated more than a dozen positive responses.
Unfortunately the scheduled starting date for the trial did not fit in with the academic timetables of most of the institutions that expressed an interest in joining the first phase of the Virtual Classroom trial. There were also a few teachers who had not used 'Words Will Travel' before and were reluctant to commit themselves to a trial using unfamiliar materials.
We eventually started the trial on October 7 with nine classes from three different countries.
Lessons Learnt So Far
Access & Activity
When selecting classes to participate in the initial phase of the trial we did not think it important for students to have individual access to the internet, since contributions to the Virtual Classroom were to be made on a class basis by teachers.
Seven of the nine participating teachers reported great benefits from using the Virtual Classroom, particularly as a way of stimulating discussion on a range of cross-cultural issues. There was also considerable initial interest from students. However, the lack of direct student access to the Virtual Classroom saw this interest begin to wane.
It is now clear that without direct student access to the Virtual Classroom (even if only on an occasional basis), many are likely to see it as another resource for the teacher, just like the other materials teachers regularly photocopy and hand out in class.
Initially we felt that activity in the Virtual Classroom would be largely self-generating, allowing us to automate the process of posting contributions. We now realise that, if the Virtual Classroom is to be a dynamic learning environment, we will need to take a more pro-active role, stimulating and moderating postings where necessary.
Materials
Building the Virtual Classroom around common course materials for all participating classes worked very well. The video drama at the heart of 'Words Will Travel' successfully achieved our aim of generating a shared context. However, in relation to the Virtual Classroom activities themselves, a number of important issues emerged.
- As already indicated, direct student involvement is essential and so there need to be activities that will help foster this. In general, internet communication is about spontaneity, "This is what I want to say, and this is how I am saying it. Respond!"
- The early activities need to provide students with both the net skills and language skills to allow them to learn how to communicate effectively within this environment. We should not be unduly concerned if some of the more formal language skills are initially skipped over or misused, they can be revisited later.
- Given that the 'street' language of the net is evolving rapidly and becoming widely accepted, a balance will need to found between the use of 'netspeak' and the educational objective of improving students' ability to communicate in everyday English.
- The design of both the Virtual Classroom site and the activities it contains needs to more accurately reflect what is happening in the general environment of cyberspace. In particular, it should include greater use of hypertext and the World Wide Web.
- Greater use of shared projects utilising the web would enhance student learning and interest in the project.
Changes For The Second Trial
We will be making a number of significant changes to the project before we start the next phase of the trial at the end of March 1997.
We plan to continue running the trial on a class to class rather than individual student to student basis. However, during the next phase we will require students in participating classes to have greater access to the internet. All participating classes will need general access to at least one computer connected to the net. There will also be greater facility for participating students with net access to communicate directly with each other.
We propose two ways that student access could be increased.
- In institutions where there is very limited access to the internet, students could be rostered to monitor the activity in the Virtual Classroom and make postings on behalf of the class.
- In classes where students have individual access to the internet, the class could be broken up into a maximum of eight Virtual Classroom groups. Each group would operate as a single entity in the Virtual Classroom with its own identifying name.
Whatever the arrangement, it is our belief that students should not work on their own, but in small groups using English to negotiate both the use of the computer and the class response to the task at hand.
A Look To The Future
As use of the Internet and World Wide Web in education becomes more commonplace, I believe that virtual classrooms will be a realistic and viable option for language learners. Before going any further, though, I would like to make it clear that I am not suggesting that everyone on the globe will be able to exercise such an option, since most of humanity will not have enough to eat in the foreseeable future, let alone have access to a computer and telephone system.
English language learners in the future, however, who are fortunate enough to eat and use the internet, will perform listening, reading and writing tasks on-line, sometimes on their own and sometimes in conjunction with others who may be on the other side of the world. Specialist teachers will also monitor their work and progress on-line.
Because of the size of the potential global market, the virtual English language classroom will be able to match students from all over the world by common interests, age and language proficiency to form groups, or 'nodes', of about ten learners. Some will be participating in virtual classes as part of their normal classwork in a real-world institution, while others will be studying at home on their own or with a couple of friends.
Once or twice a week, the ten or so English language students in a 'node' will come together for an on-line tutorial with their teacher. The exchanges at these meetings will not be keyboard-based, as with the current IRCs, but will involve real-time voice chat to provide an opportunity for speaking practise.
So, when is all this likely to happen?
Everything I have outlined is possible today, but I believe it will be another two or three years before a 'stand alone' virtual classroom will become a feasible learning option for people living in comparatively wealthy countries.
Over the last few years, most of the work spent in developing the internet and WWW has been concentrated on overcoming technological problems. At the same time, the cost of the associated hardware and software fell and continues to fall, allowing an increasing number of people around the world to go 'on-line'.
This rapid increase in demand however, already leads to frequent overloading of the system, resulting in slow or poor communication. It is envisaged that the replacement of conventional telephone lines with optical fibre and increases in bandwidth will allow the internet to keep pace with the growth in demand. Exactly how the cost of these improvements will be met is still to be determined.
Conclusion - Some key issues to consider
To conclude, I would like to raise briefly several non-technical issues which I believe are particularly pertinent to the teaching of English and which will also need to be addressed as we head towards this new educational frontier.
1. Gender Bias
The internet and world wide web is still largely dominated by men. The GVU Research Center (College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta) conducts regular surveys and reports on a wide range of issues related to the use of the World Wide Web. In their first survey in 1994 they found that 95% of web users were men and only 5% women. By mid 1995 the proportion of women users had grown to 17% and by the beginning of 1996 it was 30%.
While these figures indicate a considerable improvement in the ratio of men and women using the WWW over this period, the 1996 and 1997 surveys showed very little further improvement with about 68% of users being men and 32% women.
Clearly, it is going to be harder for an international education service to become a viable and realistic option if, for whatever reason, its medium of delivery is eschewed by half of the potential users.
2. Meeting Linear Learning Objectives
Education is traditionally a very linear process, with predetermined objectives and prescribed path(s) to achieve them. However, the internet and WWW are, by their very nature, non-linear and encourage the user to determine both the objective and the path they wish to take at any particular time.
In the short term, when most of the people learning English in a virtual classroom are likely to have little prior knowledge of the internet, courses will have to provide both language and net skills.
Within a few years this situation will change dramatically. The majority of people undertaking an English language course in a virtual classroom in the future are likely to have considerable experience of the internet and WWW. While the ultimate learning objectives may remain the same, it will be essential for teaching methods and materials to reflect the non-linear environment cyberspace if they are going to remain relevant to, and sustain the interest of, people who are net literate.
3. Teacher-Learner Relationship
The internet is a fundamentally democratic environment due in part to its history and evolution and in part to its anonymity. Regular users of the net are used to saying what they like, when they like.
The teacher-learner relationship in a virtual classroom is likely to be very different to that in most real-world classes. Learners will come from a wide range of cultural and educational backgrounds to the democratic world of cyberspace. In the virtual classroom I believe students will soon come to expect a greater say in deciding the learning paths they wish to follow. As a result, some teachers will need to re-think the relationships they have with their students.
4. Censorship
At present there is very little censorship of material presented on the World Wide Web, although access to the internet is restricted by the governments of some countries. Mounting pressure to censor the WWW will, I believe, lead to increased restrictions and controls around the world.
Most government restrictions are likely to deal with extreme issues, such as pornography and explicit violence, and are not likely to be of direct concern to internet English language course providers. Since it is in the interest of course providers to ensure that their materials are acceptable to students (and governments) in as many countries as possible, there is likely to be increased pressure to self-censorship. To what extent should we address ideological and political sensitivities when producing course materials? Course designers and providers will need to balance the risk of producing materials so bland and uninspiring as to be ineffective, against the risk offending and being banned from certain markets.
5. Imperialism and Cultural Sensitivity
The success of an English language teaching program is often measured by the degree to which the learner is able to acculturate to English speaking society. This is an issue of considerable debate. Some teachers agree that the process of acculturation is essential for successful language acquisition. Others are concerned that this process may present the English speaking culture as a bench-mark for others to aspire to.
In an English speaking country, like Australia, English is taught as a second language with the aim of preparing people to live within that society. In this case it is clearly desirable for the learner to develop a working knowledge of both the culture and the language of their adopted country, although this should not occur to the detriment of the learner's native language and culture.
However, today more people learn English in non-English speaking countries than in English speaking ones. English is also the most commonly taught foreign language by far and the number of people learning English in non-English speaking countries will increase. According to a recent article in The Economist 70% of the 5 million language lessons provided each year by Berlitz International, are for English.
For many people, particularly those from post-colonial countries, this increasing internationalisation of English carries with it overtones of imperialism. In a recent article Mike Clark from Nottingham University observed, "The spread of English is to do with the spread of empire and not its 'inherent' linguistic endowments". (IATEFL Newsletter #132).
Currently English is the language of cyberspace. Nearly 80% of all material on the internet is written in English and there is a growing concern in non-English speaking countries about the extent to which the internet will further enhance the dominance of English language and culture. Also, why should a student learning English as a foreign language in order to communicate with other non-native English speakers have to take on a whole range of underlying and possibly inappropriate cultural assumptions?
For the providers of English language courses in the international learning environment of cyberspace, this issue is likely to be critical. While cross-cultural comparisons are an important and useful component of language teaching, we will need to take great care not to step over the fine line that divides cultural awareness from cultural imperialism.
Roger Hudson
10 January, 1997