CALL Review

The Journal of the Computer SIG

OCTOBER 2004... OCTOBER 2004...

@voice e-mail
Teacher Autonomy
ACADEMIC WRITING

E-Educator
Budget CALL
STAND-ALONE
REVIEWS
The Hybrid Campus
In this issue...
From the Editor | Coordinator [ Gavin Dudeney, Spain ] page 2
From the Deputy Coordinator | List Moderator [ Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou, Cyprus ] page 3
Training the E-Educator [ Margaret Rasulo, Italy ] page 4
One Way In [ Sandeha Lynch, Singapore ] page 10
Market Leader / Talking Business: A Review [ Graham Stanley, Spain ] page 12
Self Access.Com - A Review [ truna aka j.turner, Australia ] page 15
Growing Trunk and Branches [ Lenka Bucherova, Czech Republic ] page 18
Using Voice E-Mail in the ELT Classroom [ Paul Hullock, United Kingdom ] page 22
Creating Internet-Based Lessons [ Jaroslaw Krajka, Poland ] page 25
The Hybrid Campus [ Christoper Copeland, United Kingdom ] page 33
CALL On a Shoestring [ Rodney Mantle, China ] page 37
Multimedia Design on the Cheap [ Nik Peachey, United Kingdom ] page 39
The Today Page - ‘PHPMYSQLCALL’ Spells Freshness [ David Mayo, Japan ] page 41
Book Reviews [ Michael Thomas, Japan ] page 46
Where to go if the Dictionary doesn’t Tell You Enough [ Adam Kilgariff, United Kingdom ] page 48
A Rationale for the Development of Multimedia Learnware in EFL [ Michael Thomas, Japan ] page 52
Language Teaching and Corpus Linguistics [ Christian Champendal, France ] page 58
Making IT Work For You [ Gavin Dudeney, Spain ] page 62
About IATEFL and the Computer SIG | Contact Details page 64

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004

 FROM THE EDITOR | COORDINATOR...

Halfway There... Three Rodney Mantle of China gets down and

dirty with CALL on a shoestring, as does
Down and Three to Go... Nik Peachey of the UK with a quick look at
What on Earth am I Talking multimedia design on the cheap.

About... ??? On the more technical side we have David

Mayo in Japan, examining his institution’s
use of PHP and MySQL to provide tailored,
Gavin Dudeney up-to-the-minute training for his students.

Michael Thomas of Japan provides a

thoughful review of Diana Laurillard’s latest

W elcome to the third (and last!) edition

of the Computer SIG Call Review for
2004, where we’re all looking forward to a
book on page 46, and an article on develop-
ing multimedia learnware on page 52.

good rest over the holiday season This edition is brought to a close by Adam
Kilgarriff from the UK (page 48) and Chris-
In this edition we have 16 articles from tian Champendal from France (page 58),
10 different countries: Italy, Singapore, both of whom are very much concerned with
Spain, Australia, the Czech Republic, the words and how we work with them.
United Kingdom, Poland, China, Japan and
France. I do hope you enjoy this issue - you’ll also
ind plenty of news about the Computer SIG
Margaret Rasulo from Italy kicks off this and the events and special occasions com-
edition with a look at E-educator training, ing up next year.
and she’s followed by the irst in a series of
three articles about Academic Writing from I’d like to take a moment to thank the entire
Sandeha Lynch in Singapore. committee, without whom none of this would
be possible: Gary Motteram, Tilly Warren,
Hot on their heels we have a review of Mar- Geoff Taylor, Paul Hullock, Rodney Man-
ket Leader and Talking Business from Gra- tle and Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou.
ham Stanley in Spain, and a review of the
Self Access.Com website from truna (aka Well, that’s it for my irst year of editing the
j.turner) from Australia. newsletter - one more year to go. If you’re
interested in taking over the job this time
Lenka Bucherova of the Czech Republic next year, watch this space... Have a good
takes a look at lifelong education and IT, holiday at the end of the year - however you
while Paul Hullock of the UK provides us spend it.....
with some practical ideas for using voice
email in the classroom.

On page 25, you’ll ind Jaroslaw Krajka’s

(Poland) in-depth study of the relationship
between coursebooks and the Internet,
which is complemented perfectly by a look
at the hybrid campus from Christopher
Copeland in the UK.
Gavin
IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 2
FROM THE DEPUTY COORDINATOR | LIST MODERATOR...

Upwards and Onwards Also I’d like to draw your attention to the travel grant
which our SIG is offering for conference speakers to
this year’s IATEFL conference in Cardiff. Have a look
at the requirements on p. …. and be sure to apply!
Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou
We have also improved the website of the SIG which
is now found at: http://www.iatelcompsig.org.u
Dear friends,
k. Do check it out! A special new addition to the

F
website is past issues of the SIG’s newsletter. Geoff
irstly, I would like to take this irst opportunity to
has currently uploaded issues from the years 1984
contact you to express my heartfelt thanks for
– 1995 and we will be gradually adding other past
your wonderful response to the SIG’s election for the
issues as well as recent ones. The more recent ones
Coordinator post. It was thrilling to see people from
will be added to the website the minute they turn two
so many different countries in the world, sending
years old.
in votes of support and I, personally, was deeply
touched by it.
Talking of birthdays, this issue of the CALL Review
celebrates the 20th anniversary of the SIG’s
The election itself was full of suspense but also
newsletter, which is the trigger for the uploading
with an abundance of good spirit. In the end the
of newsletter issues online. 20 years of successful
result was determined by 1 vote! Gavin received 53
existence! We owe thanks to the members’ support
votes and I received 52. We were both very pleased
but also to the tireless efforts of the many newsletter
with the results and promised each other and the
editors who have contributed to this success.
committee that nothing would change as regards the
camaraderie found among committee members.
Thank you:
In fact, the committee is full of energy and enthusiasm
David Eastment
and each member is working very hard towards
Chris Jones
making the COMP-SIG an even stronger community
Roland Nyns
aiming to fulil members’ needs and cater to their
Sue Fortescue
interests. Proof of this is in the new events and
Gary Motteram
beneits for COMP-SIG members, of which we plan a
Caroline Moore
steady low to be announced on conirmation.
Tony Williams
Mike Carrier
For now we are pleased to announce the following
Alison Piper
events:
Scott Windeatt
Paul Snooks
- Our irst ielded electronic discussion
Richard Law
– 29th January – 5th February, 2005
Martin Peacock
The topic of the discussion will be “The future
Dede Teeler
of CALL” and it will be hosted by Stephen
Gavin Dudeney
Bax, Canterbury Christ Church University
College.
With warmest wishes
- “Independently Online” – 26th February
A one-day “hands-on” event at Reading
College organised jointly with the Learner
Independence SIG. Featured speakers/
workshop leaders include Barbara Sinclair,
Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly.

- “TT and IT” – 5th April

Our Cardiff PCE event organised jointly
with the TTED SIG. Topics dealt with are
In-service IT Training and Online Teacher
Training. Featured speakers/workshop
Sophie
leaders include Gary Motteram, Paul Hullock
and Robert O’Dowd.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 3

 THE CHANGING FACE OF OUR PROFESSION...
traditional learning experience.
Training the E-Educator
What is E-Learning?
Margaret Rasulo, Italy
The changeover form traditional to online teaching will
experience resistance from many of those who fail to
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our understand it, and one of the reasons is the rather daunting
tools shape us” (McLuhan, 1995, p. ix) proliferation of specific terminology that innovation brings
about. Clarifying the language of innovation leads to the
‘demystification’ of the process, and possibly to greater

T
he vast movement towards e-learning and acceptance. A good place to start is to define the term ‘e-
specifically web-based learning is proof that the very learning’. Broadly speaking, e-learning is the process of
nature of the teaching profession is facing a great delivering information for education via electronic media,
challenge. The number of courses delivered online or with which include satellite, Intranet, Internet, CD-ROM and
an online component is overwhelming, as governments even telephone support. In the e-learning environment,
and educational institutions are more than eager to jump the ‘e’ ‘e-coach’, ‘e-educator’, ‘e-facilitator’, ‘e-educator’,
on the e-learning bandwagon to exploit the potential of the ‘e-moderator’, ‘e-teacher’ reminds all human resource
Internet as a possible alternative to traditional teaching. It professionals involved in teaching online that the added
can be assumed then that the move towards this electronic value of the technological ‘e’ has undeniably transformed
means of interacting with learning might very well affect many aspects of their role, but has preserved the essence
the process of teaching and learning forever. of the job. Nevertheless, the working domain is not quite
the same as its traditional counterpart. In this article,
Many are the prospects that online learning offers, such I have often chosen to use the term e-educator for the
as delivering education to those who are unable to attend sake of consistency, but the terms are all somewhat
face-to-face courses, supplementing traditional courses interchangeable as they indicate the diverse competencies
with online learning experiences and meeting the needs of the online adult educator.
of different learning styles, but there are also many mixed
feelings among skeptics who continue to question the According to major experts in the field, there are 4 types of
added value that this relatively new medium claims to e-learning and Broadbent classifies them as:
bring to learning. They especially question the role of
technology as an interface in the teaching and learning 1. informal
process and hope that its allure will not produce a race to 2. self-paced
‘online anything’ or electronic page turning. 3. leader-led and
4. performance support tools
Educators are well aware that online teaching alone (Broadbent 2002, p. 10)
will not always suffice. They know that it is not fair nor
wise to question the validity of face-to face meetings Informal learning does not make use of a formal
and the countless benefits of ‘live’ workshops, seminars instructional strategy, but the Web is accessed ‘freely’
and lectures where participants congregate to build merely for information retrieval. The self-paced model
relationships within a physical environment that naturally refers to the process of accessing an online course and
leads to interaction with what is to be learnt. Educators completing it at one’s own pace. The leader-led type
also need to be aware that the objective of the online involves support from a tutor or moderator or coach in
approach is not to mimic the classroom but to deliver both asynchronous (‘non-real’ time) information exchange
education that is just as effective and worthwhile for the and synchronous (‘real-time’) discussions. In the former,
learner as in the familiar and well-established face-to-face the content is posted and participants access it at their
experience. own convenience (using conferencing systems, forums,
e-mail), while in the latter, participants are online at the
This article does not attempt to add to the debate on ‘what same time (using chats, audio and video conferencing).
is better’ in terms of online vs. traditional teaching which The fourth type of e-learning is based on performance
is at the centre of attention of all those involved in the support tools and involves the learners in making use of
implementation of online education in their organization software materials available online from which they gain
or institution, but its true purpose of this paper is to argue help in performing a task. There are also various ‘hybrid’
that e-educators are not improvised and those who are types of e-learning known as blended models consisting
seeking to go online need to become ‘e-learning literate’. of an online component supported by either face-to-.face
This implies being able to apply sound principles of sessions usually in the form of workshops, or by an online
pedagogy to the online environment without giving up community and virtual classrooms (Broadbent).
the social interaction and the constructive quality of a

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 4

Essential Online Learning Principles of these roles.
Educational philosophers such as Rousseau, Dewey and Online or Traditional Teaching?
others, have emphasized that in any learning situation
we need to work from what we already know to what we Notwithstanding the growing inluence of e-learning
want to know. Relying on familiar procedures is always in education, it has been suggested that its inherent
wise, especially when the system is involved in change capabilities have not been fully explored, leaving
processes, but replication without modification will not educationalists largely unaware of the implications of
necessarily work. Change also means opportunity to embarking on this new experience, which, like any other
optimize existing procedures, as is the case with face- experience, presents risks. A word of caution comes
to-face activities. Instructor-led, linear lessons taking form the authors Garrison and Anderson who state that
place in the synchronous classroom, will not work in the “there can be no rational adoption of e-learning without
online environment. Implementers need to adapt them … an appreciation of the losses and gains” (Garrison
effectively to the new environment and this requires a and Anderson 2003, p. 6). Therefore, before committing
good knowledge of the principles that are at the heart oneself to online teaching ‘tout court’ or running the risk of
of all learning. Drawing from my own experience as an passing prior judgment on its credibility or effectiveness,
e-educator, I have identified two of the most well-known it is advisable to articulate the implications and possible
theories of learning that have influenced education for pitfalls of the changeover, as I have done in Table 1
over three decades, Constructivism and Andragogy. (see page 6) in which traditional and online education
examined vis-à-vis.
Constructivism focuses on the view that knowledge
construction is primarily a social activity grounded in Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both
human interaction while supporting the individual’s modalities conirms that the popularity of face-to-face
personal involvement. In doing so, constructivism encounters clearly lies in the ‘physical’ element which
addresses the essential values of high-quality learning sustains motivation, participation and nurtures the
described by Lehtinen as: emotional sphere. This constitutes all the more reason
why e-educators need to compensate for this lack by
• constructive
making good use of the overall strengths of the online
• cumulative
• self-directed environment which, according to the above table, are the
• goal oriented intensity of relection, convenience of study, fairness of the
• contextual role of facilitator and gender/class neutral interaction.
• abstract
• cooperative; different for every student What do E-Educators Actually do Online?

(Lehtinen cited in Stephenson, 2001) Gilly Salmon, an Open University expert in the ield
of online education and training from the U.K.’s Open
Constructivist learning theories offer the online educator University, explains that an e-moderator, the term she
and learner the opportunities to negotiate each step of the prefers to use to indicate all professionals involved in web-
learning process in a collaborative and interactional effort. based teaching, “is the person responding to and building
on the contributions to an online conference…and...should
Andragogy has been extensively used in the design of prompt, encourage and enable…openness, while
adult online programs and it is easy to understand why. acknowledging the personal experience” (Salmon, 2001,
Pioneered by Malcolm Knowles in his book “ The Modern p. 45). These e-experts, she argues, act as “companions
Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy Versus Pedagogy” in the democratic online learning process…and have the
(1970), andragogy is based on 4 main principles: “ability to visualize others in their situations” (Salmon,
2002, p.6). It is easy to imagine that e-teaching is not
1. adults need to know why they need an improvised job, but one which requires a good dose of
to learn something sensitivity and proper skills training.
2. adults need to learn experientially
3. adults approach learning as problem- Hence, the skillful e-educator should be able to use
solving the technology as a mediating force in order to apply a
4. adults learn best when the topic is of combination of principles and techniques derived from
immediate value sound educational theory and human psychology when
carrying out e-tivities characterized by the following skills:
Responding to the adult’s need for self-directed learning,
andragogy fosters learner-controlled strategies generated Presenting interactive activities: the idea of collaborative
by the use of case studies, role-playing, simulations and action undertaken online is one that underpins the notion
self-evaluation. According to andragogic principles, with of a learning community in which learning is not an
this shift in the locus of control of learning, lecturers, end for a single person but effects the group as whole.
instructors and teachers, need to adapt their tradition role Roth states: “in recent years, the notion of a community
to that of facilitator, guide or moderator and the online of practice has gained prominence as an analytical tool
world constitutes the perfect environment for the nurturing for understanding, knowing and learning. Communities

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 5

of practice are characterized by shared practices, conventions, behavior, standards of ethics, viewpoints, etc.” (W. M.
Roth, 1999, p.16).

Encouraging the participants to choose their own learning paths: online environments can foster learner-
centeredness as they have a built-in component of ‘autonomy’. The e-educator acts as a facilitator in presenting
different available options while it is the learner, with greater awareness of his/her own needs, who is responsible for
the ultimate choice.

Nurturing personal online identities: considering the lack of the ‘personal touch’ that facilitates the rapport between
teacher and individual, online adult educators need to boost self-conidence and foster self-relection habits exclusively
through messages, so that learners feel they count as ‘individuals’ within a caring community of practice involved in
achieving a common goal.

TABLE 1 - Traditional F2F Teaching V Online Teaching

TRADITIONAL FACE-TO-FACE (f2f) TEACHING ONLINE TEACHING

Boundaries Participants are usually resident students who schedule traditional classrooms are replaced by virtual
their time during the day to participate classrooms with participants from remote areas

Team spirit physical presence facilitates team building attitude tutor needs to help participants build trust without the
aid of f2f social relationships

Motivation motivation is sustained by the direction of the teacher motivation is difficult to harness due to the amount
and by the emotional aspect of the f2f experience of time the participant spends alone, often triggering
feelings of frustration and isolation
Trainer-led vs. teacher is mainly in charge roles of e-educator and participants are leveled off
Learner-led as the responsibility for dealing with problem areas
is equally shared
Time time is set in days and hours and sessions education ‘anytime, anywhere’: the process is spread
out across time and space
Expenses transportation fees, accommodation and other expenses savings: no travel costs; synchronous and
are often too hefty for non-resident participants asynchronous modes can cut down telephone bill.
On-task no time to reflect before responding unless this is asynchronous time allows participants to reflect on
reflection carefully built into the sessions an issue before responding
Materials access to course material is usually given by the unlimited access to material is given 24 hours daily
teacher (handouts, coursebooks) including links to other sites
Individual stereotypes can hinder f2f communication gender, age, and other individual characteristics are
differences unknown online
Session log tasks and training ‘discourse’ often lose momentum as online tasks are more visible as they are permanently
they leave no trace after the group dissolves unless post imprinted in the messages and always available for
course tasks are set reviewing
Technology meetings are not jeopardized by technological accidents the technology is often daunting and computer
breakdown times are frustrating
Participation presence of teacher and participants and a well-paced drop-out rates of participants are high due to: self-
course encourage and nurture participation paced format of online learning, lack of personal
contact, overload of information and limited support

Interaction interaction among participants is the main characteristic lack of interactivity sometimes turns participation into
of f2f encounters monologues (lurking)¹

¹lurking or browsing= to read conference messages

without contributing

Computer Mediated Conferencing

The ultimate challenge for the e-educator is to ‘weave in’ e-learning technology, which means applying it pedagogical

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 6

principles that are capable of exploiting its versatile establishing and maintaining an orientation towards
features (Stephenson 1999, p. 170). This does not imply task relevant goals and helping to control frustration”
that we need a ‘new’ pedagogy for online learning, but (Salmon 2002, p. 33). Building on the learner’s previous
it encourages the enhancement of existing pedagogical experience, scaffolded instruction emphasizes the role
principles that are fundamental to the process of learning. of social interaction in which learning is mediated by
Garrison and Anderson state that “because of e- an expert. The support is gradually adjusted and then
learning’s unique capabilities to support asynchronous, taken away, as the ultimate goal for the learner is to gain
collaborative communication in a dynamic and adaptable independence (Vygotsky, 1978).
educational context, we will see a resurgence of traditional
educational ideals, and we will see learners adopting the The principle of ‘engagement’ refers to the quality features
values of personal responsibility and shared control as of online tasks - what the learners are actually asked to
their own” (Garrison and Anderson 2003, p. 22). do and not just with computer programs. It speciies that
active participation, leading towards successful learning,
It is precisely the asynchronous software called CMC takes place when online activities involve cognitive
(Computer Mediate Conferencing) that provides a new processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning,
virtual context for learning and is the backbone of online decision-making and evaluating (from Keasley and
learning. It enables individuals to teach and learn, to hold Shneiderman cited in Salmon, 2002).
discussions, to access and even create materials, to form
virtual classrooms from anywhere in the world. Through Principles of Best Practices
CMC the learners experience relective communication
and knowledge sharing, but the new learning environment The principles of good communication in a computer
especially supports their individual learning styles as it conference are basically very similar to those in normal
allows for personal relection time and space to build on conversation and are largely common sense, but, because
the discussion topic or content material ofline before of the limitations of the medium (and with them the hazard
posting the reply message or task. of ‘laming’), more care and attention is needed than in
face-to-face discussion. The main principle is the intention
As for the teaching aspect, CMC allows e-educators to to come to a shared understanding, which means trying
to understand other people’s views, rather than simply
a) guide learners throughout the course expressing yourself, or worse, trying to impose your views
without being obtrusive; on others. Below is a list of the most common practices for
b) engage learners in purposeful tasks and successful online communication.
c) generate the human interaction typical of
the real classroom. 1. thank, acknowledge and support people freely:
• if you don’t receive an acknowledgement of a
message, you may feel ignored, even when
others have appreciated your contribution

CAUTION: before acknowledging, check that there aren’t

already several similar messages!

2. acknowledge before differing:

• before you disagree with someone, start by
briely re-stating what the other person has said
in your own words so that he/she knows that
you are trying to understand rather than criticize

3. speak from your own perspective:

• if no perspective is given, a statement may
seem dogmatic or moralistic
• if something is put as an absolute, there
is no room for anyone else’s perspective

4. avoid ‘laming spirals’:

• it’s easy to respond quickly to soothing
that makes you angry: before you write
your response, think about what you’re
saying, possibly re-word your message
Salmon suggests that direction maintenance and a sense and relect on the content (if it’s going to
of purpose are sustained online by two main underlying offend someone who can’t defend himself/
herself as easily in ordinary circumstances)
educational principles, scaffolding and engagement,
5. on emotions in messages:
Scaffolding “provides an overall framework for training • emotions can be easily misunderstood
and learning online…starting with recruitment of interest, so use the conventions offered in online

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 7

 communication: the emoticons or smileys : Within Sir Daniel’s deinition of ‘soft technologies’, I would
- )) :-( like to include the strategies of coaching, monitoring,
• WRITING IN CAPITAL LETTERS counseling and facilitating from which effective actions of
COMES OFF AS SHOUTING!! e-educators are derived. The following is a list of the most
common ones . E-educators should:
6. quote other messages when replying to them:
• in a busy conference or forum, it can
be time-consuming to ind the original
message in order to keep the thread going 1. provide a lexible framework for the content
a. provide limited technical support
7. effective messages: b. learners need to be familiar with the
• keep messages short, write concisely and try software
to avoid messages longer than one screen
• all messages have a subject line: indicate the 2. be ready to counsel and support online
contents of the message and make sure it is
a. the e-tutor’s main challenge is to make
clear
• make sure your reply is consistent with the up for the lack of physical presence and
subject line; if not, start a new thread emotional charge of face-to-face courses
• start a new thread only if your message b. drop-out rates are mainly due to the
cannot be inserted in a previous thread loss of social presence: nurture online
identities

(adapted from: The Open University Computer Mediated 3. encourage – request – and monitor participation
Conferencing checklist, TESOL assignment booklet) a. post messages to encourage participation
when you notice students slackening off
b. use the forum and message areas: when
Redeining the Role of the Educator: no you post or upload let students know by
Longer ‘Sage on the Stage’ but ‘Guide on the using all the resources available
Side’ c. establish norms for participation:
i. number of logon times
An abundance of literature on learner support has ii. number of messages to post
claimed for years that online learning experience should iii. kind of response expected
cater to individual preferences and styles, but how could
we possibly manage this in an environment that is so 4. respond promptly
dramatically different from the face-to-face? a. read messages regularly and make sure
It is certainly an understatement to say that it is not easy you respond within 2 days (48n hours)
to be an online learner and that this modality is not for b. remember: if your response is delayed
everyone. E-learners need special assistance as they students tend to take it very personally
are ‘deprived’ of physical interaction and visual feedback
that undoubtedly create a disadvantage, consequently 5. establish a timetable:
resulting in reluctance to participate, fear of losing face, a. actual time needed vs. lapsed time
fear of being judged, and dropping out. One common i. the activity should give an indication of
behavior of a member who feels awkward online is to how long it’s going to take to do it
delay contributions. This is known as ‘lurking’ in the online ii. and how much time students actually
glossary of terms and it mainly involves the participant in have to do it in
‘browsing’ around the conferences, reading the messages
rather than actually posting one. Although tolerated 6. avoid message overload
under certain conditions, and perhaps even accepted at a. keep messages short
the beginning of a course when participants are ‘getting i. counsel, support, monitor, facilitate: let
the feel’ of the conference, lurking is to be discouraged the students do the ‘talking’
(but not demonized) because it is by participating that b. avoid being in the limelight but don’t be
members can overcome their fears and allow learning to missing in action
take place (Salmon 2000, p. 79-80) i. send short messages to praise, direct,
correct, readdress, etc.
Sir John Daniel, Vice Chancellor of the Open University,
suggests that supporting learners and learner motivation 7. write short open-ended comments
requires having a good working knowledge of ‘soft a. try to leave your suggestions open to
technologies’. He states that soft technologies are other suggestions and comments from
“processes, approaches, sets of rules and models of others
organizations” that, along with hard technology, make e- b. direct your students towards available
learning work (Sir John Daniel cited in Sloman 2002, p. resources (net, software)
111). c. register should be informal but appropriate
and accurate

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 8

 8. summarize and weave comments at regular Association Press

• McLuhan, M. (1995) Understanding Media: the

intervals
a. at the end of each week, end of topic, etc. extensions of man, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press
Look over the comments and summarize
the content – it will give all learners, • Merrill, D. (1998) June interview in Training
including yourself, a sense of the overall Magazine
picture and accomplishment • Open University Computer Mediated Conferencing
b. quote your students in your messages checklist, TESOL assignment booklet)
and ask your students to do the same:
• Richards, J. (1994) Relective Teaching in Second
Language Classrooms, Cambridge University Press
it’s a way of acknowledging everyone’s
work
• Roth, W. M. (1999) Authentic School Science:
9. deal sensibly with lurkers Intellectual Traditions in Learning and Knowledge
in Learning and Knowledge, McCormick and Carrie
Paechter, The Open University, Paul Chapman
a. don’t push but encourage: lurking cannot
be tolerated but certainly not demonized Publishing Ltd, London
b. remember: give them the possibility of
contacting you personally to discuss any • Salmon, G. (2001) E-Moderating, The Key to Teaching
embarrassing problems and Learning Online, Kogan Page, London, UK.
c. protect participants from sarcasm and • Schank, R.C. (2002) Designing World-Class E-
other unpleasant comments Learning, McGraw Hill, USA

• Sloman, M. (2002) The E-Learning Revolution,

CIPD London
Awareness of learner feelings, learning styles, expectations • Stephenson J. et al (2002) Teaching and Learning
and background is achieved only if the e-educator enables Online, Kogan Page, London
and supports communication among the participants. All • Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society, Harvard
of this without being in the limelight. University Press, Cambridge, MA.

• Woodward, T. (1991) Models and Metaphors in

Conclusion: ‘Learning Lies in the Domain of
Language Teacher Training
the Individual’ (Sloman 2002, p.117)

The breadth of the discussion above has attempted to

illustrate some of the essential issues that at present
are driving the debate on the potential advantages to be
derived from online teaching. Because it is a big leap
towards innovation, it requires careful evaluation, as we
have just barely begun to scratch the surface of this new
pedagogical model. As Garrison and Anderson afirm:
“the challenge for twenty-irst-century educators is to
create a purposeful community of inquiry that integrates
social, cognitive, and teaching presence in a way that will
take full advantage of the unique properties of e-learning;
www.iatefl.org
those interactive properties that take learning well beyond
the lecture hall and information assimilation” (Garrison
and Anderson 2003, p. 123).

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you to write for it!!!
REFERENCES

!
• Broadbent B. (2002) The ABCs of E-Learning:
reaping the beneits and avoiding the pitfalls, ASTD,
Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, San Francisco CA

• Garrison D.R. and Anderson, Terry (2003) E-

Learning in the 21st Century, Routledge Falmer,
London

• Hiltz Starr, Roxanne, 1998. Collaborative Learning

in Asynchronous Learning Networks: Building learning
communities, address at WEB98 Orlando, Florida, Nov.
1998

• Knowles, M. (1970) The Modern Practice of Adult

Education: Andragogy Versus Pedagogy, New York:

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 9

 RESEARCH - ACADEMIC WRITING...
One Way In There are a number of guidance points that I introduce at
the beginning of a course – study hints, useful websites,

Sandeha Lynch, Singapore

note-taking and organization, time management, etc, but
I also give out a questionnaire to find out what they can
do with a computer in English. Many of them can already
Sandeha Lynch is a member of IATEFL and TESOL. He accomplish a great deal using a computer that is set up in
has an MSc in English Language Teaching Management their own native language, of course, and they may also
and teaches English for Academic Purposes to be able to perform many tasks that they simply do not
international students at several colleges in Singapore know the name of in either language. Nonetheless, the
where he has lived for the past three years. Committed questionnaire is a good vehicle for initiating discussion on
to all manner of fusions, he plays 12-bar Blues on a
concert lute and is currently building a 4x5” wooden
the different aspects of computing as, by and large, they
view camera with a digital back. He can be contacted at
will need to be able to refer to all of the computing tools in
[email protected]
English at some point in their student careers.

T
his article describes the process of Information
Questionnaire
and Communications Technology (ICT) awareness
BASIC COMPUTING
and development that I have been employing with
1 Do you know the difference between a Hard Drive
international students on academic-oriented English
language courses. The process begins with a student and a Diskette?
questionnaire to discover the ICT skills that they bring to 2 Can you organize your Files and Folders in Windows
the course, and ends when I give feedback on their own 3 Can you attach files to an Email?
4 Can you “unzip” a Zip file?
5 Can you use a PDF Reader?
websites.
6 Can you organize Favorites?
The intermediate students I have taught over the past few 7 Can you export Favorites and Address Books?
years can be described in general terms as East and South 8 Can you use a Media Player?
9 Can you use a Search Engine?
10 Can you use Instant Messaging systems?
East Asian, age 18-22, pre-college students of general and
academic English. Most of them go on to follow diploma 11 Can you use online storage sites, e.g. Yahoo!
or degree courses taught in English, whether in Singapore Briefcase?
or in another country. There is some variety in the gender 12 Can you use an Internet Chat Room?
13 Can you use an Internet Message Board?
14 Can you play Online Games?
balance of classes, but on the whole the ratio of females
to males has been 3:1. Courses may be 10 or 15 weeks 15 Can you download and install a program?
long and the class size is often around 20 students. The 16 Can you use a Scanner?
majority come from China. 17 Do you understand virus protection systems?
18 Do you have your own website?

Their English is usually just below the IELTS or TOEFL

level required for entry to college. Most began studying
English at school in the home country and have done at
least three or four years under one learning system or
another. Others have studied at international schools.

Administrative constraints and student numbers invariably

mean that at each macro level groups are split along
certain ‘fault’ lines. There are usually one or two in a group
who are noticeably more fluent than they are accurate, but
the majority are far better on paper and weak on listening
and speaking. There are usually one or two in each group
who have a very broad vocabulary, but the vocabulary of
the majority is limited to that of a few well-known course
books. There are usually one or two in each group who
hold rigidly to archaic study patterns, but the majority are
quick to capitalize on novel pedagogic processes. Their
awareness and skill with ICT is more varied, but one
significant aspect of the teaching role is to harness the
best that each student brings to the classroom and to
ensure that the students collaborate in sharing their skills.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 10

WORD concerned.

19 Can you open and save Documents? The questionnaire doesn’t ask if they can type, as most
20 Can you change the format using the Toolbars?
21 Can you cut, copy, and paste?
students will say that they can, whether with four fingers
22 Can you spell-check? or with ten. At the nuts-and-bolts level the student needs
23 Can you create Headers and Footers? to be able to type and format efficiently if they are going
24 Can you change the format of Headings? to produce effective written papers and assignments.
25 Can you create and format a Table?
26 Can you insert and format graphics?
The teacher should monitor whether students are typing
27 Can you change the Page Setup? with four fingers or ten, and recommend a typing trainer
28 Can you print? program for those who are still a little slow with the Qwerty
29 Can you change the formatting using Style? keyboard.1
30 Can you use the Document Map?
31 Can you use bullets?
32 Can you use Text Boxes? In the next article I will discuss aspects of writing online.
33 Can you use Footnotes?
34 Can you use Columns?
There are many free keyboard training programs
available, e.g. http://www.letterchase.com
(PC) or http://www.runrev.com/tenthumbs/
index.shtml (Mac)
OTHER SOFTWARE
35 What other software can you use?

The questionnaire usually throws up a few surprises

– although perhaps I am the only one who gets a surprise.

CONTRIBUTE
In one group there were only a handful of questions that
could be answered affirmatively by more than half a dozen
students. These ranged from knowing how to use a
search engine (fairly elementary) to being able to change

WRITE NOW!
the format of a document using Style (fairly advanced).
One student was familiar with online games, while another
had his own website. Hardly anyone knew about the
Document Map in Microsoft Word, but every single one
of them had used Internet chat rooms. One particular
student recognized virtually none of the terms listed
under Basic Computing or Word, but could reel off a list of
database, graphic and web design software programs that
he had used in Chinese.

The target is for the students to understand that there is a The IATEFL Computer SIG CALL Review
range of ICT tools that they will need to know about, and is published three times a year - in Spring,
should learn to use by the end of the course. Part of this
Summer and Autumn. Contributions
learning may come about through direct instruction, though
concerning any aspect of technology in ELT
incidental instruction when the need arises, or through the
collaborative assistance of other students when doing should be sent to the editor at the following
pair or small group work. They are also advised that they address:
can safely learn an enormous amount simply by playing
around with the software in the college computer labs [email protected]
– the computers are ghost-protected and any changes
to the set-up are wiped on reboot! The questionnaire is Please send contributions in any popular
given out at the end of the first week of class so that the word processor format, including your
students can complete it over the weekend. After I have biodata, a photo and any illustrations, along
looked over their responses, the questionnaire is returned
with a short abstract for the SIG website.
to them so that they can check off any new items as they
master them.
All submissions will be ackowledged and
The results of the questionnaire present a starting point you will be given a definite publication date
for development and a context for the students that lasts (where appropriate) by return of mail.
throughout the course. However, when giving them initial
feedback on their responses I also tell them to pick an ICT-
buddy in the group – someone who they can learn with or
learn from. This sometimes hands a major responsibility THIS NEWSLETTER NEEDS YOU
to a select few students, but it’s a win-win situation for all

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 11

 REVIEW - TALKING BUSINESS | MARKET LEADER...
on information handling, reporting skills, and social and
Talking Business (Intermediate) functional business language in order to promote learner
luency in a business environment. It claims to support
& Market Leader Interactive different learning styles and to give personalized feedback
(High-Intermediate) and explanations.

Setting Up
Graham Stanley, Spain Getting started with both CD-ROMs was straightforward
and did not cause any problems. Both packages feature
Graham Stanley is the coordinator of English for Tourism
the same clear introductions to how the software operates,
at Turismo Sant Ignasi ESADE (Universitat de Ramon
with extensive guided tours to help learners make the most
Llull), and a teacher at the British Council in Barcelona. He of the course. Those who want to skip this, however, and
is currently inishing the dissertation for his M.Ed. in ELT get straight into the course can do so without any bother.
& Educational Technology (University of Manchester, UK). Market Leader acts in a similar way.
He can be contacted at [email protected].
Contents

Both CD-ROMs stress the idea that they are integrated

Market Leader Interactive skills packages. The emphasis seems to be on Listening
in Talking Business, which is sensible for a supplementary
self-study CD-ROM.

Talking Business has three thematic modules (Making

Contact, Handling Information, and Reporting) each
containing four units. There is a lot of content here (an
estimated 80 hours of instruction). It would be ideal to
recommend to a weak Intermediate Business English
student, or a learner who who wants or needs extra
practice.

Market Leader’s is divided into eight thematic units:

Globalization, Brands, Travel, Advertising, Employment,
Trade, Innovation, and Organization. The focus is upon
learning skills such as making contacts, extending
The main selling point of this multimedia package seems
invitations, leaving messages, and interacting in
to be the connection with the Financial Times. Drawing
meetings.
from this newspaper’s resource materials and other
contemporary sources, Market Leader Interactive is
aimed at helping “learners master business language and
Functions, Grammar and Vocabulary
concepts”, with special emphasis on negotiating and giving The functions, grammar and vocabulary covered in Talking
presentations. The software features native language Business are solid, and the software also offers students
support (eight languages). It also boasts a “Virtual Tutor”. lots of drag-and-drop exercises that work well and are
easy and fun to use.
Talking Business
Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing
Talking Business uses its listening exercises as the basis
for its units. Pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar work
is then tied in. Reading practice comes at the end of
each unit, almost like an afterthought, and writing activity
seems to be minimal. Although the Listening exercises are
scripted, and sounda little artiicial at times, they do offer
authentic vocabulary and real-life situations.

The listening passages in Market Leader are (as would

be expected from a higher level course) authentic, and
include conversations, meetings, reports and business
This package, aimed at a lower level learner focuses

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 12

news. Writing assignments include action items and meeting summaries, promotional lealets/adverts, memos and
faxes as well as short articles and reports.

Fig. 1 - A useful ‘Culture Notes’ section opens in a pop-up window

Support
Both CD-ROMs have good Grammar Reference sections, an extensive and access to a Longman Dictionary. These
resources have been clearly (but unobtrusively) placed on the right-hand side and they open as pop-up windows. There
are also hyperlinks to relevant sections from within the course units. Another interesting feature (see igure i) is the
‘Culture Notes’ feature, an interesting extra feature that also opens in its own pop-up window.

The Orientation, Business Notes, and Help for the courses are available in eight languages, although I tried clicking on
another other language after start-up and it seemed to have no effect even though the option to change languages was
offered by a drop-down menu. Separate to the CD-ROM package, Market Leader also has an extensive companion
website.

Navigation and Design

Both courses have been very clearly designed and are easy to use.

Technical Requirements:
Both Market Leader and Talking Business are available as CD-ROMs for Windows (98/XP/2000) and are also available
as network versions. They require:

• Pentium II processor 400+ MHz

• 64+ MB RAM (128 MB recommended)
• 16-bit graphics card
• Monitor resolution of 800 x 600 or higher
• Sound card, microphone, and speakers (Microphones plugged into USB ports are not supported.)
• 10X CD-ROM drive

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 13

 39TH IATEFL ANNUAL
CONFERENCE AND
EXHIBITION

CARDIFF 5-9TH APRIL 2005

IATEFL holds its International Annual

ADV
ERTI
Conference & Exhibition every spring,
which is attended by around 1500 ELT SE
professionals from 70+ countries.
RE
It involves a 4-day programme of over 300 HE
talks and workshops and, in addition to
giving delegates a chance to meet leading
theorists and writers, and exchange ideas
with fellow professionals from all sectors
of ELT, it enables them to see the latest
ELT publications and services in a large
resources exhibition involving around 60
ELT-related exhibitors.

ADVERTISING RATES 2005

Think about it... if you’re reading this, so

are plenty of other people - and they could
be interested in your product. The CALL
Review is published three times a year.

FULL PAGE: £200 (b/w) | £250 (colour)

If you’d like to take part in one of the biggest HALF PAGE: £130 (b/w only)
and most interesting ELT events of the BACK PAGE: £300 (colour only)
coming year, visit the IATEFL website now
for more details: INSERTS
Please contact IATEFL Head Office for
issue price per brochure, diskette or
CDROM sampler.

Next issue due out in February 2005.

Contact Gavin Dudeney on gavin.dudeney

www.iatefl.org @theconsultants-e.com to advertise.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 14

REVIEW - SELF ACCESS.COM ...
Self Sccess.Com - A
Reviw
The materials are designed with two main groups of
English Language students in mind: those studying for
language proiciency exams such as the IELTS. FCE,

truna aka j.turner, Australia

TOEFL and TOEIC, and general language practice across
the three of the four macro skills for students wishing
to improve their language abilities. The materials cover
truna aka j.turner is a lecturer in TESOL, education reading, listening and writing. As yet there is no option for
and technology and communication design at the
Queensland University of Australia, Brisbane. She can
live speaking.
be contacted at [email protected]
“SelfAccess will help to improve and develop
the skills required for IELTS, FCE, TOEFL and
TOEIC examinations. SelfAccess lessons provide
questions and task types that may be encountered
At a Glance: in these exams. Lessons include reading, writing,
listening and grammar activities, they are fun
Program title: Selfaccess.com and rewarding and are ideal for those students
either studying at secondary or tertiary level, or
Distributor: English-To-Go Ltd,
as preparation. SelfAccess also provides General
Level 4, 68 Shortland Street,
English activities. These can be used to practice
Auckland 1001
skills for work, school or travel. General English
New Zealand
exercises include reading, writing, grammar and
Phone: +64 (9) 375-3090
comprehension activities. There are 100’s of
Fax: +64 (9) 375-3041
lessons in the library. Academic English support
Program information: http://www.selfaccess.com/ is provided for those students already studying at
E-mail: [email protected] secondary or tertiary level. Lessons are based on
current news articles from Reuters®.”

System requirements: Web-Based cross-platform (from About Selfaccess)

materials. Requires sound
card, speakers or headphones
Price: US $15.00 a month
US $25 single payment for 2
months
Institution price available on
request
Free trial lessons available
Sample lessons available

Overview:

T
he selfaccess.com web site is a sister site to the
popular English-to-go ELT teaching materials web
site http://www.english-to-go.com/ which has
been providing lesson plans to teachers and activities to
students since 1998. The English-to-go group consists of
practising English language teachers and professionals
based in New Zealand. Basically, the selfaccess.com site
offers access to a library of materials and well developed Description:
lessons based on authentic texts at very low cost.
The site offers a large library of materials – over 300 in
The selfaccess.com site focuses on students although it the browse the library category, each lesson is graded
could be used with groups in a class – computer lab. It and described in terms of topic, skills practiced and level.
provides self-study learning tools for English language For example:
students by exploiting the basic interactivity of the web
and current news articles from Reuters.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 15

Number: 330 The exercises are mainly constructed from Martin Holme’s
TexToys1 and other Half-baked software2 which does mean
that progress cannot be saved by the user and that they
Title: Golden wool have to keep their own records of scores, but as the overall
Topic: Animals, Strange but true, Fashion goal is practice rather than training this doesn’t seem to be
Two Australian sheep farmers have a problem. The team have used these materials creation
produced the world’s finest wool. tools and a variety of others with very strong teaching and
Skills: Grammar - passive, adjectives, learning goals to produce an enormous range of materials
completing a summary for the independent language student.
Level: Pre-Intermediate
Date: April 2004

Topics available are all based on news items, some

grouped together into single lessons. There is a large
database of topics available, many of which would lend
themselves to post class activities as well as being
appropriate in form and tone for the student wishing to
practice for English Language exams.

The lessons themselves are based on authentic materials

from Reuters, mainly audio and text, and each lesson
consists of a number of different exercises – some of them
offering ten to twelve different activities.

Design and construction of the tasks or exercises is

professional and demonstrates good pedagogical
underpinnings within the web based medium. The skill
practice offered in each lesson focuses exploits the
potential of the web to provide activities and structural
practice for accuracy – there is, as yet, no overt community
or communication opportunity available via this particular
site but it will work very well if used in conjunction with
either classroom based learning or perhaps exploitation of
some of the freely available English language community
chat rooms and web sites. This makes the site particularly
attractive to those students who are highly motivated to
undertake guided practice for examination purposes and
is relected in the level descriptions of the materials in
general and the expectations of the materials themselves.
Typically, each lesson is theme based exploiting a listening
taken from Reuters or a reading, followed by a number of Because the Selfaccess.com materials are all available
different exercises. In ‘Greying the World over’, an upper via a website, new materials are instantly accessible and
intermediate level academic English lesson, the user are evidently added very regularly – the library provides
commences with a grammar based cloze activity and then evidence of materials added on a weekly basis with the
moves on to a timed reading comprehension activity, a most recent in June 2004 – so the materials are growing
vocabulary activity, a structured writing activity, listening all the time.
and multiple choice listening activities and text building
activities. Users can search the library either by topic, level, skill
or speciic lesson number and there is a feedback
The student starts each lesson with an entry page option which has thus far provided a good turn around
announcing the topics covered and the learning on response from the company. The selfaccess.com
outcomes. team also provide a regular newsletter to members
providing information about newly added materials and
The exercises do not have to be completed in any order offering study tips and links to other helpful sites for the
and most offer hints and help as well as the ability to independent English language student.
check answers at any stage. Outcomes are available at A casual browser is invited to access a selection of
all times. sample lessons or to participate in the free three day trial.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 16

 39TH IATEFL ANNUAL
Subscribed members need to log in via the front page and

CONFERENCE
while the library lists are available to casual browsers,
access to the lessons themselves requires a username

AND EXHIBITION
and password.

Evaluation: CARDIFF 5-9TH APRIL 2005

Access to the Selfaccess.com materials works out at less
than 50 cents a day and because of the sites continuous If you’re coming to Cardiff in 2005, why
updating, offers very good value for money. The lessons not consider joining in with the joint Pre-
are very professionally constructed and the range of Conference Event (PCE) organised by the
available topics is engaging and current.
Computer SIG and the Teacher Trainers and
The team have recently upgraded site navigation and it is Educators SIG?
now much easier for users to ind their way around. The
use of Martin Holme’s robust web materials generation This one-day event will be on the day before
tools means that the bandwidth demand is very low for the the main conference starts, and has as its
most part, although those operating within irewalls may
theme: IT in TT.
ind the audio streaming a slight issue.

Feedback on the site from a variety of English language You’ll have the chance to attend a variety
teachers and students has been very positive about the of sessions based on the theme, given
range of the materials and the quality of the exercises by practitioners in the ield, as well as
available.
the opportunity to take part in the open
These materials are ideal for the teacher who doesn’t discussion at the end.
have time to create their own and for the English language
student who is looking for engaging practice in order to You can reserve your place on this exciting
improve their English proiciency for general or exam event when you register for the main
purposes. It also provides an excellent library of examples
conference. Places are limited to 50 for
for those who are interested in how to exploit web
based tools in order to make their own speciic learning this PCE, so please book early to avoid
opportunities. disappointment.

More information can be found on the

Computer SIG or TTEdSIG websites:
1
TexToys is a suite of two authoring programs,
WebRhubarb and WebSequitur. The programs are used
to create web pages which contain interactive language- www.iatelcompsig.org.uk
learning exercises. The exercises are based on the www.ihes.com/ttsig/
Rhubarb and Sequitur programs originally developed by
John and Muriel Higgins.

2
http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com/

www.iatefl.org

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 17

 RESEARCH - LIFELONG LEARNING AND VLEs...

Growing Trunk &

(2). Learning styles comprise learning strategies, tactics,

Branches, or Let’s Think

simple procedures employed by students during the
learning process. The more of them students master,

About Lifelong Education

the more effective and quicker their learning is. Printed

Factors in WWW Learning

textbooks have shown certain limitations because of the
limited extent of the textual and learning styles employed.

Environments
Good net-based learning materials should offer many
learning styles e.g. by hyper-linking to other learning sites
and, moreover, a wider choice of learning texts supports
self-regulation of content. The need to “concentrate“
Lenka Bucherova, Czech Republic
information in net-based teaching materials is not so
strong, since these can be more comprehensive, more
Lenka is a lecturer in ESP at Brno University of
students can ind sites complementary to their basic
Technology, Faculty of Chemistry, Brno, Czech Republic.
learning materials and that match their learning needs and
She can be contacted at: [email protected] provide more practice and feedback.

Other aspects related to self-regulated learning are critical

thinking and self-diagnostic skills (3). They help learners
WWW - Overrated or Undervalued? to monitor their learning by telling them which materials

T
are suitable for learning, which knowledge they have
his author’s research on the potential of internet
acquired, which they should gain and how their learning
based learning / teaching materials for support of
is progressing. Manifold feedback provided in learning
pedagogical aspects vital to life-long education
materials can strongly support self-diagnostic skills.
has brought results applied in the form of “English for
Hints offered by interactive exercises can help students
Chemists” an internet textbook. Almost no studies on
diagnose the state of their learning critically by showing
the above potential have been implemented, thus the
their weak points and helping them to develop effective
importance of this study lies –based on the results of
learning styles; choice of learning materials supports
the research itself - in showing how to design electronic
critical thinking.
learning environments effectively from educational and life-
long education points of view using the relevant potential
Recently, the need to develop new learning materials
of internet based learning. Electronic learning environment
that would match all the above learning needs better
designers rarely consider the potential of the internet for
than classical textbooks has been expressed. On the one
development of either learning styles/life-long education
hand, printed teaching materials have proved themselves
or other pedagogical aspects, up to know there isn’t much
to be powerful learning sources, on the other hand they
information about it that is why the author implemented the
cannot be connected directly to other learning materials.
above research and why she publishes this article.
Students can work just with the textbook text that cannot
be updated often or adjusted to particular student needs,
The educational theoretical background and presumptions
and feedback provided is limited. Once every couple of
are described in the introduction to this article, whilst
years a revised edition of a textbook can be published
details and results of the research as well as the design
with limited chances to present the learning content in any
of the internet textbook employing the results of the above
kind of individualised form. Textbooks can also be sold out
research afre addressed later. The practical application
before the new edition is published, which can’t happen
in the form of an internet-based textbook “English for
with internet based textbooks.
Chemists” can be found at www.fch.vutbr.cz/angl2 .
Some disadvantages of net-based learning materials
Educational theoretical background: Life-long
should be taken into consideration, too. Technical
education has become a must for everybody (1). All of
problems with the internet, computer access and personal
us will have to extend our knowledge and develop our
study material preferences should be considered.
skills throughout our entire professional careers. Recently,
educational science has found ways to implement this
The results of both qualitative and quantitative research on
kind of education in the most effective way: learners
the development of individual learning styles by net-based
(including employees educating themselves along lifelong
learning materials are discussed in the next section.
learning guidelines) should adopt self-regulation learning
techniques, which means that they should be able to set
learning goals, to monitor their learning process, employing
critical thinking to choose suitable learning materials and Research Implemented
especially develop their learning styles, which all relect
decreasing dependence on the teacher igure Two groups of 46 university students each were asked to

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 18

fulil the Vermunt-Van Rijswijk Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) prior to, and after, the experiment which took 1 semester
(three months). A control group used printed textbooks, whilst the experimental group studied from www-based
materials with hyperlinked complementary websites. The topics studied were identical in both groups – selected items
of grammar, the 4 skills and vocabulary. Both groups were supervised by the author. Students in the experimental group
chose relevant learning websites / internet sources according to their individual choice and / or they acquired addresses
of useful websites from their peers. A specially designed electronic board for the above address exchange was available.
The acquired data were processed by the SPSS statistical package (Statistical Package for Social Sciences).

Based on evaluation of pair t-tests of signiicance of differences between the data prior to, and after, the experiment
table 1 shows that the following learning styles were developed in the experimental group of students who had used
web-based learning materials (the experimental group): critical thinking, self-regulation of learning (ability to monitor their
learning process), decreased dependence on the teacher, a study approach based on the acquisition of new knowledge.
The external regulation of the learning process (teacher’s help and feedback) and application of acquired knowledge
deteriorated - probably some teacher assistance and immediate application in peer-to-peer contact are necessary.

Table 1 - Changes of Learning Styles in an Internet Based Learning

Environment – Experimental Group

Column C shows the difference between means prior to (1), and post (2), the experiment, column G comments on
changes according to common values given in LSI, column I shows signiicant differences between the data prior to, and
after, the experiment. If the number is lower than 0.05, the change is statistically signiicant.

As apparent in Table 2 (see overleaf) students who used printed learning materials developed simple concretization
of acquired knowledge and some degree of self-regulation of content (ability to choose an appropriate study text). The
learning styles developed in the experimental group remained unchanged in the control group. Column C shows the
difference between means prior to (1), and post (2), the experiment. Column G examines changes according to common
values given in LSI, column I shows signiicant differences between the data prior to, and after, the experiment. If the
number is lower than 0.05, the change is statistically signiicant.

The results of the qualitative aspects of the research shown in Table 3 (overleaf) are as follows: the experimental group
using web-based learning materials mainly appreciated those learning websites with clear, well organized structures,
supported with hints and exercises with a key, and combining theoretical aspects with practical applications.

Students also appreciated other qualitative aspects of the research - being able to employ learning styles that cannot
be used with textbooks – learning materials according to their choice, peer cooperation in the form of discussion in an
electronic environment (peer-to peer electronic cooperation), the use of authentic special materials they themselves
found or were recommended by peers, and the possibility to suggest their implementation in future learning materials
(choice of learning material according to individual learning style).

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 19

 Table 2 - Changes of Learning Styles in Group Learning from Textbooks in Teacher
Lead Seminars - Control Group

Table 3

On the other hand, a minority of students in the experimental group (about 5 %) did not appreciate the use of web-
based learning materials and printed internet learning materials, thus they could not exploit all the advantages described
above. Moreover, a couple of students reported tired eyes, headaches and other health problems. Some students coped
with their natural aversion to using computers. Most of the students in the experimental group (68%) declared that they
had learned more from the web-based materials compared to standard printed textbooks.

Practical Application of the Above Research in a WWW Textbook

It is precisely because of the need for a new English for Special Purposes course at the Brno University of Technology I
have been teaching at, that the web-based learning material “English for Chemists” was developed. The intention was to
design a comprehensive set of materials relecting the results of the above research representing the “trunk and branches”
of the learning material and which would not require any publishing expenses, could be adapted to student needs
lexibly and would be able to support the development of life-long education supporting the disparate learning styles of
university students. The learning materials were also intended for distant courses and life-long education courses, too.
Individual lessons of English for Chemists were uploaded to the website in the form of an internet textbook as follows:
Besides standard explanations and exercises, relevant websites on topics discussed in lessons are hyperlinked, e.g. the
“Environment” lesson was enhanced with a link to the enn.com site that offers topical environmental news accompanied
with audio iles. This site serves as a complementary learning material to the basic environment-oriented texts in the
textbook. This helps students to develop teacher independence and be partially responsible for the acquisition of
knowledge and self-regulation of the learning process: students can also choose a learning website according to their

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 20

individual learning style. They can support their critical Another ield of possible research is learning motivation in
thinking by evaluation of the relevant websites. Moreover, online environments.
two aspects of self-regulation of learning - the ability to
diagnose their study progress by the means of feedback Conclusions
available (exercises with key on hyperlinked websites)
and the subsequent process of setting study goals - are The results of my research on the support of internet-based
supported by other linked grammar-oriented websites with learning environments for educational factors related to
exercises and key that can help students to remedy the lifelong education show that the following learning styles are
grammar problems revealed by themselves during work developed: critical thinking, self-regulation of the learning
on individual topics (e.g. “Environment”). Hints provided process, decreased dependence on the teacher and an
on those websites (impossible in printed materials) also ‘acquisition of knowledge’ learning approach. However, the
support self-diagnostic skills important for self-regulation application of knowledge acquired and external regulation
of learning. of learning (teacher help and assistance) don’t seem to be
supported by internet-based learning materials. Students
Students suggesting useful learning websites prefer electronic learning materials with clear, well organized
at an incorporated electronic discussion board structures, supported with hints and exercises with keys,
w w w. f c h . v u t b r. c z / h o m e / b u c h e r o v a / b b / combining theoretical aspects with practical application. Using
board.php?boardid=3 develop the following components the above learning materials students can develop speciic
of learning styles: critical thinking (they evaluate learning learning styles that can’t be employed with printed textbooks:
websites they have chosen), decrease of teacher peer-to peer electronic cooperation and evaluation, choice of
dependence and self-regulation mechanisms (they use learning material according to individual learning style.
the websites for teacher independent learning during
which they themselves regulate their own activity). Short Thus an internet-based textbook “English for Chemists”
intentionally incomplete lists of vocabulary with relevant grown on the trunk and branches of the above research
free space give the students a chance to complete them results has been designed. It develops important lifelong
according to their individual needs. This way teacher education factors in the following way: teacher independence
independence and learning self-regulation are supported. and the acquisition of knowledge and self-regulation of the
The list is enclosed because of lack of pronunciation learning process is developed by adding hyperlinks to
references and comprises just the words with dificult relevant learning websites, self-regulation of learning and
pronunciation; students can ind some more pronunciation teacher independence are supported by exercises with
help in the hyperlinked Webster dictionary. Student essays keys and hints, electronic discussion boards support critical
can be submitted and peer reviewed on the discussion thinking, increased independence from the teacher and
board, increasing critical thinking and independence self-regulation mechanisms by the learning sites address
from the teacher. The electronic textbook is available on- exchange and by peer evaluation of submitted essays. The
line and in printable version for students who prefer one layout of the internet textbook also relects the results of the
version over another. qualitative research – the material is clearly designed, it
comprises exercises with keys, hints, employs some learning
To alleviate the negative inluence of internet-based learning styles typical to the internet based environment – use of
materials on increased need of external regulation (teacher discussion boards, individual learning styles, etc.
help and feedback) I incorporated hints and keys that
seemed to be used by the students effectively. Moreover, The negative inluence of the environment is compensated
in face-to-face seminars I try to help when necessary. To for by these key and hint equipped exercises, teacher
support the application of knowledge acquired (again not assistance and regular assessments. Cooperation and some
supported by internet based learning materials), exercises more results of other relevant research on learning styles on
are included and students are asked to shape dialogues, the internet - and probably on motivation - would be needed
essays and Powerpoint presentations on topics assessed to cpmplete this study.
and chosen. The following address offers some examples
of Power Point presentations www.fch.vutbr.cz/home/ References:
bucherova/pres.htm
1. Weinstein C.E., Van Mater Stone G. (1996).
Learning Strategies and Learning to Learn. In: De
Based on the above, web-based learning materials can Corte E., Weinert F.E. (Eds), International Encyclopedia
support lifelong education, but they do not exercise any of Developmental Psychology and Instructional
magical educational power. The importance of the article Psychology, Oxford, Elsevier Science, p.419
is relected in its aim: to pick-up on the lifelong education
supporting factors that can be developed by web-based 2. Zimmermann B.J, Schunk, D.H. (1989) (Eds).
Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement,
New York, Springer, p.169
learning materials because of their potential for the
development of certain skills and approaches and to let
the web-based learning material designers employ them 3. Kohoutek R. (1997). Human Personality, Academic
effectively. Further research on learning styles supported Publishing House, Brno, p. 46
by internet-based environments implemented with more
participants from cooperating institutions would be needed.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 21

 PRACTICAL LESSON PLAN - VOICE EMAIL...
LESSON PLAN NOTES

Using Voice Email in the

ELT Classroom
What You Will Need
1. A reasonably fast Internet connection is
essential as sound files take some time to
download.
Paul Hullock, United Kingdom
2. You will need to know the e-mail addresses
Paul lives in the UK and works for Bell. He is also Events of all your students or create addresses for
Coordinator for the IATEFL Computer SIG. He can be them. For the sake of simplicity I would
contacted at: [email protected] suggest working with web mail addresses.

3. Obviously it will be necessary for the

teacher to have a microphone to record his or
her message and headphones to listen to the
Introduction messages before they are sent. The students
will also need to listen to their messages and
using headphones is less disruptive than
using speakers as only the listener can hear
There are a number of services on the Internet that offer a
the message
free voice e-mail service. Instead of sending a written e-
mail the user can record a message which, once sent, can
be listened to by the recipient. A service I have used in the 4. Copies of Activity 18 from the Reward
past is Wimba, a company that currently offers a free voice Elementary Resource Pack.
e-mail service on the net.
5. 12 students and a plan for dealing with
Why Use Voice Email? more or less than 12 students in the class.

6. You will need to let Wimba check your PCs

to see that you have all the necessary Active
Being able to use sound files with students adds a
X downloads on your system. Wimba will
genuinely multimedia dimension to Internet lessons. This
lesson is a dictation of different parts of a story. download them if they are not already on
your machines.
This kind of lesson also makes the best use of the Internet
as a tool for collaborative learning and allows the teacher
to integrate a range of different skills and activities into Plan
a computer lesson. In this lesson the students use the Level Elementary
computers as the starting point of the lesson. Students required 12
Source Material Reward Elementary Resource
They listen to an audio file sent by the teacher (as many Pack 18 “Poor Fabio” 1
times as they like) before going on to write what they hear Aim Further practise / revision of past
onto a piece of paper or into Word (a dictation), speak as simple verb forms
they negotiate the correct order for the 12 sentences that - improving listening skills
make up the activity and then speak and write again as -improving writing skills
they do a community dictation. The majority of ready- Activity Listening and writing practice
made listening texts on the Internet are not necessarily using a community dictation
appropriate or of the right level for your students. With this Time 90 minutes (?)
kind of activity the teacher can tailor the listening text to
the level of their students using material which is already
in print.
Procedure

Before the Lesson

The final point I would make is that I feel this kind of lesson
really exploits the full potential of the Internet and ITC in
1. Before the lesson starts the teacher will need
general as a learning tool. The only way a lesson like
to ind out from her/his students their web e-
this could be done away from computers is if the teacher
mail address or alternatively create web mail
were to make 12 cassette recordings and then send the
addresses for 12 students.
students in the class to 12 different classrooms with 12
2. The teacher records and sends each of the 12
cassette players before getting them all back together!
sentences from the activity to the students.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 22

During the Lesson a) Choose DEMOS

3. In the classroom, the teacher gives out the b) Complete the registration form that appears and Wimba
pictures. will e-mail a password and user name that you will need to
4. Students predict which verbs will be in the story. login and use the site.
Brainstorm in pairs and then plenary.
5. Teacher puts verbs on the board c) Login
6. Teacher elicits past simple form of the verbs
7. Teacher allocates the picture that relates to the d) Choose “SEND A VOICE E-MAIL”
sound ile that each student will hear.
8. Students go to their web mail e-mail inbox and e) You will then be asked to install some software.
open their e-mail from the teacher and listen to Choose Yes.
their sentence. Students can listen as many times
as they like. Students write down their part of the
story. You will then see the following screen:
9. Teacher checks that each student has got his or
her sentence correct.
10. Students form a line in the order of the story by
telling each other their sentence and teacher
checks.
11. Next, students do a community dictation. In the
agreed order, each student reads out what they
have written down and the others listen and write
down what they hear in Word (or on paper).
12. Students have 5 minutes to review.

After the Lesson

13. Teacher corrects all the writing.

Before the Lesson

Before the lesson, at least a day before the lesson, To send a message:
you will need to record and send your voice e-mail
messages, i.e. the 12 sentences. To do this go to http: 1. Fill in the from, to and subject boxes as you would
//www.wimba.com. with a normal e-mail:

You will see the screen below: From = your e-mail address
To = your students e-mail address
Subject = Poor Fabio 1 (to 12)

2. Next, Choose the Record button and dictate the

relevant sentence using your microphone.

3. Choose the Stop button to end your recording

4. Choose the Play button to check that you have

recorded the sentence correctly and listen to your
message with the headphones.

5. If you are happy choose the Send button and the

message will be sent to the students’ inbox.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 23

 1
Reward Elementary Resource Pack, © Susan Kay, 1997, Heinemann English Language teaching

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 24

AUTONOMY FROM THE COURSEBOOK - A CASE STUDY...

Creating Internet-Based
This section will start with bringing back the idea of the
relationship between the teacher and the coursebook,

Lessons - Towards
where the latter is given much more prominence at
the expense of the teacher’s role. Thus, in Grammar

Teacher Autonomy for a

Translation Method, since the emphasis was on the study
of foreign language texts, translation, study of grammar

Coursebook
rules on the basis of texts, the textbook containing texts,
grammar rules, paradigms to study and exercises was the
most important element of the course (see Richards and

Jaroslaw Krajka, Poland

Rodgers, 1986). The book was the source of knowledge,
while the teacher was downgraded to the transmitter of
this knowledge, who was supposed to explain patterns,
Jaroslaw works in the Department of Applied Linguistics execute exercises and provide help in students’ native
at the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin,
Poland. He can be contacted at: [email protected].
language.
lublin.pl A similar approach to the role of the coursebook and the
teacher was adopted in Suggestopedia (Lozanov, 1978;
Larsen-Freeman, 1986), where the greater importance
Introduction was given to texts to be read suggestively by the teacher
Nowadays the use of Information and Communication (direct support materials, as to be distinguished from
Technology, the Internet, computers and software is well- indirect support materials such as classroom fixtures and
established in foreign language teaching and learning. music). Thus, a Suggestopedia coursebook, as Richards
There are more and more new ideas on practical and Rodgers put it (1986), should have texts organised
implementations of technology in the didactic process, around units and dialogues with subthemes, with 150 new
proposed by computer specialists and language teachers words in each part, and each unit governed by a single
alike. However, the use of technology has been, in many theme with a variety of subtopics. Some other methods
cases, devoid of sound pedagogical principles, and that favoured the coursebook over the creativity of the
many teachers might have become disillusioned after the teacher were the Audiolingual Method (Richards and
incidental applications of technology. Rodgers, 1986; Larsen-Freeman, 1986), which relied on
listening to, repeating, memorising and practising a given
The purpose of the present paper is to investigate the dialogue orally, without reference to the text, and therefore
role of Internet-assisted teaching in the development of it was not necessary for students to have a coursebook,
teacher autonomy, to demonstrate how the teacher might but for the teacher a coursebook and a teacher resource
gain independence from the coursebook with the help of book were a must. Similarly, the currently popular Callan’s
the Internet. Thus, after outlining the relationship between Method imposes a kind of script on the teacher to follow
the teacher and the coursebook, some basic guidelines on rigorously without absolutely any deviation.
curriculum development will be given. Then, the process
of designing Web-based lessons will be presented step by A less extreme position has been taken by a number
step, supported by examples of Internet-assisted lessons of other approaches, where it has been believed that
created by the present author for a regular secondary teaching materials are extremely important elements
school course for pre-intermediate students and a design of a language classroom, however, the teacher should
for an English for Specific Purposes course for students of be a conscious user of these, employing their own
archaeology. judgment and suiting the materials to the needs
and expectations of the class. One can name here
The Teacher and the Coursebook – a Situational Approach (also known as Situational Language
Historical Overview Teaching), where the coursebook contained tightly
organised lessons focusing on dialogues and presenting
Traditionally, there have been three main elements of language patterns in situations, and planned according to
a language classroom: the teacher, the learner and the a syllabus of grammatical structures, relying heavily on the
coursebook. In different language teaching approaches use of visual stimulus (pictures, maps, drawings). On the
and methods of the past and the present the emphasis whole, the coursebook in this language teaching method
has shifted from one onto the other, at the same time was meant to be only a “guide to the learning process”
determining the role and responsibilities of the others. and the teacher should be “the master of his textbook”
Therefore, a more teacher-centred approach is bound to (Pittman, 1963: 176).
have learners subordinated to the teacher, and the teacher
being in full or almost full control of the coursebook and Similarly, the proponents of the Natural Approach, Krashen
other teaching materials. and Terrell, believed that classroom activities should be

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 25

related to the outside world, thus, teachers are advised to use prepare a digest of the class conversations, to provide
such materials (pictures, visual aids, schedules, brochures, some focus on key structures and vocabulary used, and
advertisements, maps, books and games), as they promote give students the opportunity for reflection. Thus, one can
communication and enhance comprehension (Krashen, see that the textbook came into being after the lesson,
1982; Krashen, Terrell, 1983). Following coursebooks and its subsequent units were composed by learners
rigorously was rejected as they did not represent real life, themselves, with the teacher steering the conversations
and did not allow students to immerse themselves in real and providing focus on structures and words.
language, but the one prepared for the learner in mind.
Thus, teachers were advised to use a syllabus of topics and The Teacher and the Coursebook, the
situations, and introducing realia to conduct lessons taking Teacher and the Curriculum
into account the needs and objectives of the particular class
as expressed in the needs analysis. The teachers who are enslaved by the coursebook
and follow it rigorously and blindly might not have the
According to Richards and Rodgers (1986), Communicative adequate awareness of the language teaching method
Language Teaching coursebooks should contain the and the curriculum underlying the textbook. It must be
elements of text-based materials (texts and dialogues), remembered that the coursebook is the final product in
task-based materials (games, simulations or role plays) and the long process of materials development. Thus, the
realia (real-life signs, ads, maps, pictures, symbols, graphs first step on the road to gaining autonomy by the teacher
and charts). The way these materials were organised and should be gaining greater awareness of the curriculum
integrated could vary, from a functional-notional syllabus, that one has to or has decided to follow. Thus, what
a spirally functional one around a structural core (Brumfit, must be considered are the following components of a
1980) purely functional syllabus (Jupp, Hodlin, 1975), purely curriculum:
notional (Wilkins, 1976) or task-based (Prabhu, 1987).
A similar stance was taken in Lexical Approach (Lewis, o theoretical foundations of a curriculum together
1993; Willis, 1990), where the coursebook was important with a language teaching approach adopted;
in that it focused on words by giving the most frequent of o aims and objectives;
them based on frequency counts in a language corpus, and o a syllabus (a list of teaching content);
typical lexical coursebooks emphasised the importance of o principles of selection, ordering, gradation of
words over grammar, offered learners the potential to create material;
structures and make useful generalisations for themselves, o techniques and procedures to achieve the aims;
with the teacher being highly restricted in the modifications
of the teaching content, as the words prescribed had to be

About CALL Review

taught, but freer in modifying or creating tasks.

At the other end of the continuum one can place language

teaching approaches which minimise the role of the
coursebook by placing decision-making in the hands of the
teacher or students. Thus, Asher (1977) claimed that Total
Physical Response (TPR) could not have a coursebook, as
it would restrict the teacher by imposing some ordering of
items or ways of presenting them. Therefore, the teacher
decided what to teach, selected and presented new
materials, and he was advised to collect materials and realia
(such as everyday objects, pictures, slides, word charts).

According to Gattegno (1972) and Stevick (1980), similarly

the Silent Way did not demand a coursebook for a course,
The CALL Review is only available
as the teacher could compensate for it with extremely
high involvement in the classes, as well as a set of well- to members of IATEFL who
developed teaching aids (a set of coloured rods, colour- have chosen to belong to the
coded pronunciation and vocabulary charts, a pointer, Computer Special Interest Group.
reading/writing exercises, as well as secondary materials
such as books and worksheets, picture books, tapes, For details on how to join IATEFL,
videotapes, films, other visuals). please see the back cover of this issue.
Finally, Counselling Language Learning (Curran, 1976)
To contribute to the next edition
disallowed using a coursebook, as it would impose content
and order of its presentation on learners, while students
(due February 2005), please see the
are to regulate their learning and determine the content. information on page 11 of this issue.
However, in order to reconcile learners’ needs and teacher’s
expectations, after each CLL lesson the teacher should

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 26

o assessment scheme and passing requirements; o Internet-assisted lessons being in loose relation to the
o specific techniques, materials and teaching aids; curriculum, used to reinvigorate the classroom, providing
o the role of the teacher and learners; general language practice (see collections of activities by
o techniques of motivating students; Windeatt, Hardisty, Eastment, 2000; Dudeney, 2000);
o evaluation of the teaching process.
o Internet-assisted lessons organized into a well-thought
The curriculum for a course needs to be developed before out syllabus, having a clear progression and following
any other decisions, also on the teaching aids, are taken, a principled content gradation (Gitsaki, Taylor, 2000;
and it is highly inappropriate to select a coursebook to be Krajka, 2003).
taught without its thorough consideration in terms of the
curriculum. Depending on the context, there might be a In the later sections of the present paper, both the first
single curriculum imposed by the school administration solution (lesson plans supplementing Opportunities Pre-
(as may be the case in Polish private language schools, Intermediate coursebook, Harris, Mower, Sikorzynska,
especially in exam preparatory courses), the teacher 2000) as well as the third one (a Web-based curriculum
may be free to choose a curriculum from the ones that for teaching English to archaeology students) will be given
are officially acknowledged by the Ministry of Education as examples. In case of the latter, which involves adapting
(which is the case in the Polish mainstream education) or and supplementing the ready-made coursebook materials,
the teacher might be obliged by the school administration the teacher has the following techniques at their disposal
or the lack of existing curricula to create one’s own. (after McDonough, Shaw, 1993):

As can be seen, the materials are on one of the lowest levels - adding/expanding (giving the same quality of material
of designing the course, and are the actual implementation but more quantity) - students go to the site of online
of the assumptions adopted while preparing for it. Above newspapers, www.onlinenewspapers.com, and read a
all, one must consider the usefulness of the curriculum (and few articles about current affairs in different countries, then
the resulting teaching aids and materials) in the precisely share these with other groups;
determined context of a given class to be taught, having
specific learners in mind, rather than just considering it - deleting/subtracting (reducing only quantity, leaving
theoretically. It is highly probable that there will arise a quality unchanged) - students go to an Internet bookshop,
need to supplement the language teaching process with e.g., www.amazon.com, and read the summaries of
additional activities or materials that will relate the ready- books instead of extracts from them;
made coursebook to the needs of students and the aims
of the teacher, however, this need should be based upon - rewriting (relating the structure of activity to students’
the foundations reflecting the higher order issues, such as needs) - after having read a text about Auckland, students
aims, objectives and procedures to achieve them. search the Web and design a 3-day trip, book a flight
and a hotel, plan every hour of their stay, find sights and
entertainment places interesting to them;
The Internet for Lesson Design
4.1. Introductory Issues - restructuring (changing the mode of presentation or focus
The main aim of the present paper is to demonstrate how of the activity) - instead of reading texts about disasters,
thanks to the use of the Internet for finding classroom students go to http://www.fema.gov/hazards/ website,
materials, creating and conducting lessons, the teacher where they need to find the information about particular
can gain independence from the coursebook, can be disasters to complete the table;
more flexible as for realizing the aims adopted in the
curriculum, while the conscious teacher autonomy will be - simplifying (making texts simpler in terms of structure,
largely conducive to increasing teacher motivation. Thus, lexis, grammar) - instead of having students read a text
once the curriculum has been evaluated on a variety of about marriage conditions, students could research the
planes, taking into account for instance the syllabus type, websites in different countries to check what are the
the balance of skills, the amount of skills work vs. grammar necessary conditions to get married, where it is easiest or
development, the amount of grammar vs. vocabulary the most difficult to get married;
focus, the quality and quantity of textual input, the variety
and interest of topics of texts and units or types of tasks - re-ordering (changing the order of activities/grammar
and forms of work, the teacher might see the need to use exercises).
some other medium for creating lessons and conducting
classroom instruction. In such a case, Internet-based The important issue to be remembered is the typical format
instruction is available in the following modes: of Web-based lessons, which, against a popular belief, will
not solely consist in working with the computer during the
o using the Internet together with the coursebook, with whole lesson, but the mainly receptive while-Web stage,
Internet-assisted lessons serving a supplementary comprising largely human-computer interaction, should
function, being strictly correlated with the coursebook be balanced with pre- and post-Web stages, bringing
contents, reinforcing and consolidating the ideas learnt productive skills such as speaking or writing to play,
(Krajka, 2002); allowing for teacher-whole class grammar or vocabulary

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 27

presentation sessions, finally, adding different groupings, word-processor to create vocabulary exercises for other
and especially pairwork, to the lesson. students, to be done later on. Thus, the lesson, apart from
giving more reading practice, also teaches how to use
Internet-based instruction should include mainly tasks online reference tools and fosters students’ independence
that are enabled by the use of the Web and computer by allowing them to choose the text to be read and to
mediation and add a new dimension impossible to achieve create vocabulary tasks for each other.
otherwise. Thus, one could think about using the following
types of tasks (after Luzon Marco, 2001a, Luzon Marco, Internet Lesson 1 - Going Beyond Limits
2001b, Luzon Marco, 2001c, Luzon Marco, 2002):
Objectives:
- Interpersonal exchanges: keypal exchanges with a
similar class, electronic appearances, ask-a-question; • To find out more about people performing
unusual feats
- Information collection and analysis: treasure hunts, • To practise reading for general idea
telefieldtrips, focus discipline research; • To work on vocabulary connected with exploring,
adventure and travel
- Publishing and editing: collaborative writing, class web • To learn how to use online reference tools
publishing
Time: two 45-minute periods
- Problem-solving: WebQuests, simulations and games,
online research modules. Resources Used:
Computers, Internet websites, word-processor
These types of activities ought to develop different
language skills in a variety of classroom groupings, not Possible Problems:
only individual work with the computer. It is especially Intermediate students may find it difficult to fully understand
important to avoid purely human-computer interaction in the language of some websites which are not specially
Web-based lessons, thus, especially pre-Web and post- made for them, but are meant for the whole English-
Web stages should involve group or pairwork. speaking community. Due to that, students need to not
only work out meanings from the context, but use fast
4.2. Web-based Lesson Design in Practice online dictionaries to get help. Thus, the teacher should
To demonstrate the above ideas in practice, what follows devote some classroom time to showing students how to
is an example of an Internet-assisted lesson, designed for use such dictionaries.
use with a given coursebook (Opportunities Intermediate,
Harris, Mower, Sikorzynska, 2000). Before you Start

Unit 1 of Module 1 of the book has a reading skills focus • Go to the sites of online dictionaries (http://dictionary.
and features a 600-word-long text. The text is accompanied cambridge.org, www.dictionary.com, www.leksyka.pl,
with one pre-reading activity (“look at the title and photos h t t p : / / w w w . m - w . c o m / d i c t i o n a r y. h t m , h t t p : / /
and guess the answers to the questions given”), two while- www.yourdictionary.com/, http://nhd.heinle.com/), see
reading tasks (true-false statements and working out the which one is the fastest, the most comprehensive, the
meanings of new words from the context) and one post- easiest for students to understand the definitions.
reading task (“read the text again, answer the questions
and discuss with the whole class”). Also, the unit features • Make a Web search for “dictionary +online” to find some
two wordbuilding exercises using the words from the text, more sites, perhaps not only monolingual but also bilingual
as well as a speaking task (two students read different (e.g., http://galaxy.uci.agh.edu.pl/~polak/slownik/,
texts, then ask questions and complete the table with the http://akson.sgh.waw.pl/~anthon/slownik.html, http:
detailed information about the explorer). //www.poltran.com/, http://www.ectaco.com/online/
diction.php3?lang=7)
The Internet supplement for this lesson provides additional
reading practice and speaking tasks, but also, what • Check the sites for explorers given below, to see whether
is more important, students develop dictionary skills, the URLs have not changed and whether the sites still
learning how to use free online dictionary tools and how to exist.
switch between the dictionary window and the text window.
During the lesson the reading text from the book serves as Procedure
a stimulus to come up with a profile of an explorer. Then
students have the choice of text to read, see whether the 1. Refer to the text “The Race to the Pole” (p. 8). Ask
profile matches their explorer, finally tell about him/her to students to summarise what the text was about, as well as
some other person in the class. In this way, the information describe Amundsen and Scott. Ask them if they would like
gap created by the variety and choice of Internet materials to be in their shoes, or become explorers.
is exploited to develop students’ communicative abilities.
Finally, students work with an online dictionary and a 2. Students work in pairs on creating a profile of an

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 28

explorer. They could be given some prompts to talk about, 4.3. Web-based Course Design
such as: age, sex, marital status, physical appearance, On the level of course design, an example of applying
personality/character, greatest dream, biggest worry, the ideas outlined above is creating a Web-based
greatest achievement, a goal to pursue, etc. coursebook supplement (Krajka, 2003). The teacher
autonomy of the coursebook encompasses not being
3. After that, students should be given the URLs with totally dependent on available materials, especially when
texts about some explorers (Antarctic Explorers, Ernest these are not suitable for the needs of a given class, but
Shackleton, http://www.south-pole.com/p0000097.htm, finding resources, evaluating the websites and creating
Robert F. Scott, http://www.south-pole.com/ classroom tasks based on these. The awareness of the
p0000089.htm, Richard E. Byrd, http://www.south- procedure of Web-based course design is especially
pole.com/p0000107.htm, Jean Baptiste Charcot, applicable in the situation when a given ESP class does
http://www.south-pole.com/p0000096.htm, William not have any appropriate ESP coursebook, but uses a
S. Bruce, http://www.south-pole.com/p0000093.htm; general English textbook with ESP extensions made by
Space Explorers, Marc Garneau, http://www.space- the teacher. Thus the process of creating a Web-based
explorers.org/bios/garneau.html, Loren W. Acton, ESP course can be described as follows:
http://www.space-explorers.org/bios/acton.html,
Scott D. Altman, http://www.space-explorers.org/bios/ - creating a student profile;
- conducting a student needs analysis;
altman.html, a list of space explorer biographies, http:// - analysing coursebook structures, topics, functions, lexis
www.space-explorers.org/membership.html) and asked and trying to come up with corresponding Web-based
to read two of them. Now they have to go through the texts ones;
quickly, see whether the profile they have come up with fits - ordering them into a syllabus;
- finding and evaluating relevant materials (texts,
particular people, and try to note the information under their recordings, activities, resources);
headings. - matching the materials with structures, topics, functions,
lexis;
4. Then it is the time to summarise chosen texts to the - creating classroom tasks and language exercises;
- beta-testing the material by students and fellow teachers.
whole class, and using the details gathered students need
to retell the life and adventures of a chosen explorer. The
whole class needs to listen attentively and try to decide As can be seen, the steps of the process above demand
which explorer performed the most extraordinary feats. the shift in the role of the teacher, from a language
provider to a materials writer, from a teaching aid and a
5. The teacher points students to some Web dictionaries resource to an organizer and a facilitator. An ESP course
(see URLs above) and shows them how to look up

GET MORE...
meaning. Students should practise toggling between two
windows of the Internet browser, namely the one with a text
to read and the other with a dictionary lookup window. Next,
they should practise highlighting words in the text, copying
them, switching to the dictionary window and pasting words There’s more to the IATEFL Computer SIG than
to get the definition. just the newsletter. We have our own website and
an active Yahoo Group.
6. To develop online lookup skills, the teacher asks students
to go back to one of the texts they read, find ten new words,
look them up in a Web dictionary and note down the
meanings.

7. As further dictionary practice, students should find some

other 10 unknown words and pass them on to another
group, which would have to look them up in an online
dictionary, highlight, copy and paste their definitions to a
word-processor and save the document.

8. The teacher should collect documents with dictionary

definitions and distribute them among students to read Visit the website at:
and learn, which would act as further vocabulary practice.
At home students should use the words and definitions to
make vocabulary exercises for each other, such as complete
http://www.iateflcompsig.org.uk
an example sentence with an appropriate word or match a
word and a definition. When making the exercises, students To join the mailing list, visit: http://
work with the word-processor, practising such operations groups.yahoo.com/group/IATEFLComputerSig/
as moving the text, copying and pasting, making tables, or send email to the following address: IATEFL-
etc. During the next class learners exchange vocabulary [email protected]
exercises and test their retention of the new lexis.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 29

for archaeology students, where there are no ready-made ESP materials on the Polish market, uses the Internet as a
basis for additional tasks, either to be done in class or a self-study mode. Its aim will be to provide ESP grammar and
vocabulary input, make use of the appeal the Internet has for students, use the almost infinite amount of materials and
fast access to them.

The general English coursebook used (Wavelength Pre-Intermediate) has 6-page long units, each subdivided into 3-4
lessons of 45 minutes; after every four units there is a 1-page intensive reading and listening section and after every
four units there is a 1-page grammar and vocabulary revision section. On the other hand, the Web-based supplement
will have two Web-based lessons made for each unit, with possible extensions for self-study; a Web-based project;
self-study quizzes; an intensive Web reading section and a writing task, all every four units. In this way the amount of
Web-based instruction and standard coursebook instruction will be balanced in the ratio of 1-4. For the topical thread
of the coursebook, careful consideration has been carried out, and the topics that are as close as possible to the ones
of the coursebook, but pertaining to the ESP area of study, have been found. Table 1 compares the original topics with
their ESP extensions.

U1: Meeting people (people) Meeting archaeology experts

U2: Money matters (money) Financing the expedition
U3: It’s your life (biographies) Archaeologists from the past
U4: Hooray for Hollywood (cinema) To make a film – true stories of curse & death
U5: Playing by the rules (rules and regulations) Do’s and Don’ts on an excavation site
U6: Where on earth? (places, weather) Finding and describing new digouts
U7: The cruel heart (film characters, film scenes) Crime on the site part one
U8: Future dreams / nightmares (actions and consequences) What will happen if we … ?
U9: My place (describing rooms) The temple uncovered
U10: He loves me, he loves me not (relationships) Love and hatred on the site
U11: If …(inventions, gadgets) Shall we make the work easier…?
U12: Love me, love my car (zodiac signs) The supernatural in our command
U13: What a holiday (holiday plans) Work on holiday, holiday at work
U14: Crime doesn’t pay (crime) Crime on the site part two
U15: What are you talking about (gossiping) Did you hear that they found …?
U16:The strangest thing happened... (coincidences) Tales from the expedition

Table 1 - The corresponding topics of the coursebook and the Web-based supplement

A similar procedure was carried out using the functional thread, where the social English expressions and the situations
they were presented and practiced in were related to the ESP discipline of archaeology students, with the following result:

U 1: Requests, offers, answers Asking questions about digging techniques (ask-an-expert)

U 2: Giving opinions, agreeing, disagreeing Discussing the expenses on the expedition (group work)
U 5: Showing interest Listening to others talking about archaeology research (chat
discussion with a partner class)
U 6: Asking for information, giving Showing others the place of new digouts on the maps (pair work
directions task, chat room task, discussion group email task)
U 9: Telephoning, asking for repetition Talking about the new sites (pair work)
U 11: Giving advice Tips for inexperienced diggers (class website bulletin board)
U 13: Making complaints Dealing with a complaining non-digging boy/girlfriend (pair
work speaking task)
U 15: Using relative clauses Describing what you have found (email letter)

Table 2 - The functional thread related to the ESP discipline

The other components of the Web-based coursebook supplement, namely the intensive reading sections, writing tasks
and projects, added as an extension unit after every four units, were devised in accordance with the topics, structures
and functions in the four units, so that they served as consolidation of the language material introduced in some
situation relating to the students’ future profession. The results can be seen in Table 3 below.

Intensive reading sections: Writing tasks: Projects:

1. Archaeologists from the past 1. The archaeologist of the millennium 1. The expedition budget plan, with
– reading for specific information (to – my recommendation. implementation and expenditure
compare).

2. Crime on the site – reading and 2. The account of the survivor – a 2. The excavation site rules and
continuing the story. diary of an archaeologist. regulations listing
3. How things work – reading to extract 3. The inexplicable chain of events on 3. A murder on the site – the
the most important points. the site – an article for a tabloid supernatural or the villain? The
newspaper. police investigation.
4. Tales from the expedition – reading 4. Promoting the excavations and 4. Archaeology in the future – how
and putting the events/paragraphs in fundraising – a passionate speech to to make the work more effective
the correct order a party of business people

Table 3 - The Web-based Extension Units

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 30

Towards Teacher and Learner Autonomy in promote communication through students’ having variety
Internet-Assisted Instruction and choice and, consequently, information gap arising. At the
moment, the following scenarios for Web-based learning can
When implementing Web-based instruction, the teacher be envisaged:
gains independence from the coursebook when having the
option of teaching the same content but with the changed - ELT publishers add Web-based coursebook supplements
medium – Internet materials instead of coursebook to their general English coursebooks (as CD-ROM or Web-
materials. Thus, as the examples above show, Internet- based materials);
based lessons can be equally successful in achieving
given teaching aims, however, without restricting the - teachers acquire the rules of making Web-based
teacher’s freedom in using a given set of materials. supplements and create them on the local level;

From the point of view of students, Internet-assisted - EFL/ESL Web portals enable teachers to share their own
instruction promotes learner autonomy by placing some materials, providing free access to a multitude of resources
responsibility for the selection of learning content in their in different disciplines, on different language levels and
hands. As Krajka and Grudzinska (2002) note, the supplementing different widespread coursebooks.
importance of the use of the Internet to promote learner
independence involves allowing them to work at their own It is hoped that the future will see the continuation of the
pace, on the materials they choose themselves, giving process of teacher gaining independence of the coursebook
them variety and choice that a coursebook will never and moving more into the role of materials writer, lesson
offer, finally offering an attractive and interactive learning maker and course designer.
environment. However, what must be remembered is that
because of the replacement of coursebook materials by References

Asher, J. (1977) Learning Another Language Through

Internet websites the role of the student has changed. In
an Internet-assisted classroom, the student has a variety of Actions: The Complete Teacher’s Guide Book. Los Gatos,
materials pertaining to the same subject, and may choose Calif.: Sky Oaks Productions.
the ones that are easiest to comprehend, most appealing Brumfit, C.A. (1980) Problems and Principles in English
Teaching. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Burke, K., Brooks, J. (2000) Wavelength Pre-
as for the contents or the graphic side. Obviously, this
demands that students be taught how to evaluate sources Intermediate. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
and discriminate between good and bad ones, and they Curran, C. (1976) Counselling-Learning in Second
are given constant guidance so as not to be overwhelmed Languages. Apple River, Ill.: Apple River Press.
Dudeney, G. (2000) The Internet and the Language
Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
by a multitude of resources.
Gattegno, C. (1972) Teaching Foreign Languages
It is also the teacher’s role that is significantly changed. in Schools: The Silent Way. New York: Educational
In a traditional coursebook classroom, the teacher is Solutions.
Gitsaki, C., Taylor, R.P. (2000) Internet English. New
York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
responsible for presenting to students the texts or activities
designed by the coursebook authors. A coursebook must Harris, M., Mower, D., Sikorzyńska, A. (2000)
be followed in the order it is made, as activities and Opportunities Pre-Intermediate. Harlow: Pearson
structures are often interdependent. Thus, the teacher Education Limited.
Jupp, T.C., Hodlin, S. (1975) Industrial English: An
Example of Theory and Practice in Functional Language
has little possibility to adapt materials, and his/her role is
limited to that of a waiter, serving the food prepared by a Teaching. London: Heinemann.
team of excellent cooks. In online instruction, the situation Krajka, J. (2002) The Internet as a Coursebook in EFL.
is completely different - the teacher has at his/her disposal Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Poznan: Adam Mickiewicz
University.
Krajka, J. (2003) “English for Specific Purposes on the
a great variety of ingredients, spices, and methods of
preparing food, while it is his responsibility to combine World Wide Web – A Proposal for a Web-Based Coursebook
these into a delicious dish. Time consuming it may be, but Supplement”. ESP World, http://www.esp-world.info/
certainly builds up the teacher’s confidence as a conscious articles_5/ESP%20ON%20THE%20WWW_2.htm.
Krajka, J., Grudzinska, Z. (2002) “Using the Internet in
the Language Classroom to Foster Learner Independence
materials writer/developer. Therefore, it may be said that
Internet-based tasks not only foster learner independence, - Ideal and Reality”. IATEFL Poland Teacher Development
but also create opportunities for developing teacher and Autonomous Learning SIG Newsletter, issue 7, June
independence. 2002, http://www.iatefl.org.pl/tdal/n7krajka.htm.
Krashen, S.D. (1982) Principles and Practice in Second
Language Acquisition. New York: Pergamon Press.
Conclusion Krashen, S.D., Terrell, T.D. (1983) The Natural
Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom.
Oxford: Pergamon.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (1986) Techniques and Principles
The introduction of Web-based learning, both on the level
of lesson design and course design, makes it possible for in Language Teaching. New York, Oxford: Oxford
the teacher to become independent of the coursebook and University Press.
realize the same topics, achieve goals and create activities Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach. The State
of ELT and a Way Forward. Hove: Language Teaching
Publications.
with the access to a multitude of authentic, up-to-date and
appealing materials. A Web-based classroom will naturally Lozanov, G. (1978) Suggestology and Outlines of

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Suggestopedy. New York: Gordon and Breach.
Luzon Marco, M.J. (2001a) “Information Collection
and Analysis Activities: Virtual Fieldtrips (Tele-

CELEBRATE...
Fieldtrips)”. Teaching English with Technology, vol. 1,
no. 5, September 2001, http://www.iatefl.org.pl/
call/j_esp5.htm.
Luzon Marco, M.J. (2001b) “Information Collection
and Analysis Activities: The Treasure Hunt”. Teaching The Journal of the Computer SIG - CALL
English with Technology, vol. 1, no. 4, July 2001, http:
//www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_esp4.htm.
Review - is exactly 20 years old this month.
Luzon Marco, M.J. (2001c) “Problem-Solving Years ago when David Eastment was at
Activities: Online Research Modules”. Teaching English
with Technology, vol. 1, no. 6, November 2001, http:
the helm it was called MUESLI News - you
//www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_esp6.htm. can find out why by visiting the Computer
Luzon Marco, M.J. (2002) “Ask an Expert Activities:
An Example of Interpersonal Exchange”. Teaching
SIG website at:
English with Technology, vol. 2, no. 1, January 2002,
http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_esp7.htm.
McDonough, J., Shaw, C. (1993) Materials and
Methods in ELT. Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell.
Pittman, G. (1963) Teaching Structural English.
Brisbane: Jacaranda.
Prabhu, N.S. (1987) Second Language Pedagogy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Richards, J.C., Rodgers, T.S. (1986) Approaches and
Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stevick, E.W. (1980) Teaching Languages. A Way and
Ways. Rowley: Newbury House Publishers.
Willis, D. (1990) The Lexical Syllabus. London: Harper
Collins Publishers.
Windeatt, S., Hardisty, D., Eastment, D. (2000) The
Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

http://www.iateflcompsig.org.uk

This newsletter needs

And while you’re there, you should also have

you to write for it!!!

a look at one way in which we’re celebrating
this anniversay - our webmaster Geoff
Taylor has been busy putting up archived

!
copies of the newsletters from the old days.

This is a long-term project (thanks Geoff!)

and more will be added throughout the
year - so if you want to see how far we’ve
come since the good old days, get along
to the website and start downloading.

Happy Anniversary to us all!

JOIN IATEFL NOW

If you’re reading this but you’re not yet a member of IATEFL, please consider joining a growing body
of professionals world-wide. With access to mailing lists, websites, journals, special publications
and more, IATEFL is a perfect way of keeping up-to-date with what’s going on in our world. You’ll
find details of how to join on the back page of this publication, or visit www.iatefl.org for more details.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 32

 well in the Virtual Classroom environment... Other
THE HYBRID CAMPUS...
examples include

The Hybrid Campus:

debates, group projects, case studies, simulation
and role playing, sharing of solutions to homework

Supporting International
problems and collaborative composition of essays,
stories or research plans.” (1995)

Students in Class and

Online
Steeples argues that, within H.E., there are particular
kinds of student to which CMC offers advantages.

“We have found CMC discussions especially

Christopher Copland, United Kingdom

appealing to classes of learners that find
participation in traditional seminars difficult: often

Chris has taught for the British Council in Hong Kong,

women (especially in technology), overseas
Jordan and Singapore and has also worked in the Czech
students whose first language is not English, part-
Republic. He has an M.Ed. in Teaching English to Speakers
time students and students lacking in confidence
of Other Languages and a Certiicate in I.T. for Open and
to speak out in face to face situations.”
Distance Learning. He joined Royal Holloway University
of London in 2000 and at present is closely involved in For non-native speakers, the rapidity of turn–taking in
the In-sessional English Language Programme, as well a face-to-face conversation can be difficult to keep up
as ICT Co-ordinator for the Language Centre. He can be with and swift changes of topic can be baffling. CMC,
contacted at: [email protected] however, offers an opportunity to participate fully and build
confidence. It is, therefore, not surprising that attempts
have been made to exploit this medium for language
Computer Mediated Communication learners.

Since the advent of the Internet, Computer Mediated CMC and English for Academic Purposes
Communication has established a niche for itself both in
distance learning and mainstream education. Put simply, A recent example is the ill-fated e-university’s attempts
CMC is a means of exchanging messages in an electronic to produce online modules in English for Academic
forum. Although private e-mail may be a feature of such a Purposes. Despite the e-university’s closure this year, this
system, messages are generally one-to-many rather than work is being continued by the University of Southampton.
one-to-one. In addition, communication is not real-time. More well established is the Merlin project, based at the
Messages can be sent or read at any point, though a University of Hull, which has supported courses in EFL
moderator may set deadlines for discussion. and EAP on its Virtual Learning Environment.

The fact that one can participate in a discussion without Oakey describes how Merlin was used to respond to the
being tied to a particular time or place is clearly convenient. limitations on the EAP provision that could be offered
But there are claims beyond this, that CMC can generate to In-sessional students at Hull. Traditional classes had
conversation that is of a higher quality than that in a face- been difficult to schedule due to clashes with timetables in
to-face context. A distance learning practitioner, Tony students’ home departments. Moreover, as contact hours
Kaye, makes the case like this. only amounted to less than a quarter of those required
to earn course credits, there was a need for an efficient
“Even in situations where there are no constraints means to monitor independent study. An initial experiment
on the use of in-person meetings, CMC can with using e-mail contact between tutors and students was
provide a valuable additional dimension to group superseded by the use of Merlin, which proved to be a
work: for example, turn-taking tends to be more more efficient alternative.
equally distributed in CMC sessions, inputs are
often more thoughtfully composed because of the Supporting Seminar Skills
text-based nature of the medium, and a written
record is maintained of discussions which can run This article will examine a contrasting attempt to support
continuously over a given period.” (1989) In-sessional learners, which was made by the Language
Centre at Royal Holloway (University of London), using
In a Higher Education context, Hiltz relates a number of the college’s Virtual Learning Environment, Learnwise
applications to which CMC can be put. (www.learnwise.co.uk) . The use of this VLE was guided
by the college’s policy of the “Hybrid Campus.”
“Seminar style discussions are an example of a
collaborative learning activity that is often difficult “Royal Holloway will develop web-based learning
in traditional classrooms but which tends to work

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 33

 that complements existing provision without replacing it. Students will beneit from the advantages of new
technologies without losing the beneits of a campus-based education...”

Thus, Learnwise was used to support a course already running, rather than attempting to offer alternative provision.
Given the assets of CMC for promoting discussion, a Seminar Skills course seemed an appropriate one to adapt. This
course had been a popular choice with students, with usually two or three classes each of up to twenty students running
per week. There was thus a guaranteed minimum number of students with which CMC could be trialled and its beneits
for international students tested.

This article will investigate how the CMC discussions on this course compared to those conducted face-to-face, both
in terms of the volume of messages generated and in their quality. Did the opportunity to detach the discussion from
a speciic time and place prove a valuable one? Beyond this, did the support of the course by a broader VLE prove
worthwhile?

In the early stages of the course, it was the last of these questions that was addressed irst. Documents of support material
were uploaded onto Learnwise for easy access by students - copies of the course notes, as well as supplementary
guides on making presentations, using Powerpoint and preparing visual aids. In addition, a bank of materials from
which students could research their presentation topics was made available via a link on the VLE. In previous years,
articles selected from a publication called “Issues” had been used for research. This was replaced by password access
to “Issues Online,” a website (www.independence.co.uk) from the same publisher, which offered students a much
wider selection of articles. They were initially guided to this resource in a class session in a computer lab. As there was
an obvious practical value in gaining access to the articles, students were initially amenable to Learnwise and thus to
being shown some of the other functions it could offer.

During the mid-term break, students prepared their presentations, which were delivered in the second half of the course.
The standard format had been for each presentation to be followed by a class discussion. This continued, but in the
second class in which presentations were delivered, students were given the opportunity to extend the discussion in a
CMC environment. In class time, students were taken to a computer lab and introduced to the Forums in Learnwise.
During this session, they practised using the Forums on a topic related to that day’s discussion. Once acquainted with
the medium, they were given a “homework” task on a related theme. They were asked to log on and make a contribution
two or three times over the week and informed that this would be credited in their inal assessment. This process was
repeated in a subsequent class.

Evaluation

How successful was this activity? In terms of volumes of messages, it would appear very much so. In one example,
a group of 14 students generated 87 messages during their in-class induction to the Forums. In terms of quality of
discussion too, there were examples of some remarkable exchanges, that lived up to the claims practitioners like Kaye
and Hiltz have made for CMC.

Take this thread of messages on the topic of asylum seekers:

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 34

All of the contributions are considered and have some degree of depth. Chiara and Katerina speak from a degree of
personal experience and Kiyohiro refers to a UN Convention on refugees. He also refers to the message of another
student, Matteo, and is thus engaging in a conversation rather than simply making a statement.

It is Katerina’s posting, though, that seems most worthy of comment, for I doubt whether in a class discussion she would
have been willing to reveal something so personally felt and which needed to be explained at such length. One might
query whether what she says about Czech Gypsies is racist. There is certainly an ambivalence in her resentment at
feeling an outsider in Europe, yet also sympathising with the UK’s reluctance to welcome her poorer countrymen. What
seems important, though, was that a space had been created in which she felt comfortable to honestly express her
feelings and in which other members of the group could respond to them in a sympathetic but candid way.

Something else is noteworthy about these messages and that is the times and dates in the header. The three postings
(from a longer thread of seventeen) were made over a 15 hour period, including one at 3 o’clock in the morning. The
discussion is thus genuinely asynchronous.

This, however, has to be balanced by the fact that this kind of thread was the exception rather than the rule, at least in

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 35

the sense that it proved dificult to persuade students to
post messages out of class time. Including asynchronous
discussion as part of the assessment provided some
motivation, as did appointing a student as a discussion
“chair.” However, motivating students to post messages in
their own time remains a challenge. On the other hand, the
“real time” discussions did prove successful, one teacher
describing them as “impressive, really good,” appearing to
take away students’ inhibitions and offer an opportunity for
everyone to participate.

Indeed, the in-class element of the use of Learnwise

seems to have been one of the keys to the success of the
course. An attempt to use the Forums on a Pre-sessional
programme to encourage co-operation between students
destined for the same Departments appears to have been
hindered by the fact that the entire task, including initial
instructions by e-mail, was conducted online. The result
was that, without face-to-face guidance, few students
completed the task set, though numerous messages were
generated.

One spin-off from the attempts to use Learnwise has been

an enthusiasm amongst tutors to exploit the potential of
the VLE for easy communication with students and to lift
some of the administrative workload from staff. As one
Team Leader commented:
UPDATE YOURSELF...
“I have used it as a means of storing info. on the
Pre-sessional. This was very useful and drastically Some of you will recently have received an
reduced the amount of paper needed.” email from me introducing myself as the new
Coordinator of the Computer SIG..... BUT,
Extending the “Hybrid Campus” to Language Centre many of you will not have got anything as
students thus appears to have been a qualiied success. we don’t have email addresses for you - or
The range of communication skills international students the ones we DO have are out of date and not
are prepared for now includes the use of the College
working anymore.
VLE. Students and teachers respond well to the use of
CMC, which appears to add a new element to seminar
We would very much like to be able to keep in
discussions, though a reluctance remains to log on out of
touch with you on a regular basis, with news,
class hours. The provision of course materials, research
updates, questions, comments, reports, etc.
sources and administrative information in a single
electronic location has given ease of access to students
If you would like to update your IATEFL Computer
and has reduced tutors’ workload. All of which must be
SIG profile, please get in touch with me directly
good news for teaching staff.
with the following information:
References
First Name:
Hiltz S. R. (1995) Teaching in a Virtual Classroom,
Family Name:
Gateway 2000 International Conference on Computer IATEFL Membership Number:
Assisted Instruction, National Chiao Tung University. Email address:
Available from: www.njit.edu/njIT?Department/
CCCC/VC/Papers/Design.html
I will then ensure that your details are updated. I
Kaye A. (1989) Computer-mediated communication look forward to hearing from you...
and distance education in Kaye A. (ed.) “Mindweave,”
Pergamon Press. Available from: http://www-
icdl.open.ac.uk/mindweave/chap1.html

Oakey D. (1999) An EAP module via the Merlin Internet

Learning Environment, http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/
conference/abstracts.htm

Steeples C. (1997) Educational Models in CMC, C SALT, Gavin Dudeney

Lancaster University. http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 36

CALL ON A SHOESTRING...

CALL on a Shoestring
Adapting at LNNU to teaching exclusively with chalk and
talk was indeed a challenge, not least because I had
last used chalk some seven years before: my previous
U.K. school had been a Technology College, the proud
Rodney Mantle, China
possessor of such delights as computer-controlled lathes.
Our irst semester at LNNU teaching oral skills to future
Rodney Mantle retired from Guildford High School and as
teachers of English was thus very slow. IT was restricted
Chair of the ALL’s German National Committee in 2003. to downloading items onto our own computers from well-
He is a member of the Committee of IATEFL Special known Internet sites such as ONESTOP and photocopying
Interest Group on Computers. Paul Louis graduated them.
from King’s College London in Philosophy in 2003. Both
are participating in the British Council’s China Teaching Observing that there were some classrooms with a
Programme as English teachers at Liaoning Normal
University in Dalian, China. Rodney can be contacted at:
computer, a projector and a screen, I enquired about the
[email protected]
possibility of occasional access to them, only to be told,
"But, Rodney, you don’t need IT for Oral English." It is
a compliment to the lexibility of university management

T
in China that in the following semester Paul and I were
eaching French, German and Spanish at a U.K. peregrinating round the campus to use IT projection
school bristling with Promethean interactive facilities of whose existence we had not previously been
whiteboards (72 in all, at the end of my time there) aware. At irst, our students lamented the longer walks
and boasting a number of highly competent IT staff was a to class, but as the teaching – and the weather! – visibly
challenge for me as the MFL Department’s IT Co-ordinator. improved, such comments ceased.
The range of interactive whiteboard facilities available
grew constantly, and so did the children’s IT skills. What did we do with our newly acquired facilities? At this
Training British MFL teachers in the use of the interactive point the temerity of my enquiry became clear. To attempt
whiteboard at a school keen on new teachnology (not a to purchase EFL software would have been baying for the
spelling mistake – will anybody like my neologism? Or has moon. If the budget of the School of Foreign Languages
someone else got there irst?) was not really a preparation included an item on the acquisition of software, the
for the new challenge that faced me a few weeks after my information had not been passed on to us, and as far as
retirement in July 2003. we knew nothing was available locally. The only solution
was "do it yourself," and we did. The task was not made
any easier by the virtual lack of any IT facilities (including
printers and scanners) outside our classrooms. On the
other hand, we had brought our own computers and the
University provided us with broadband.

The irst task was a division of labour.

I, teaching sophomores (U.S. terminology prevails in

China) and postgraduates, worked on grammar and
speech patterns. I am indebted to the British Council
in Seoul: during their CELTA course in the 2004 Spring
Festival break I was able refresh my Promethean
interactive whiteboard skills and to experiment with
PowerPoint, creating some materials that I could later
enhance and reuse.

Paul, teaching freshmen, agreed to tackle mainly

pronunciation, stress and intonation, as well as language
In August 2003 I moved to my current workplace, Liaoning games and general oral skills such as hesitation and
Normal University (LNNU), a teacher-training university illers. In the process of creating his materials, Paul used a
in northeastern China. With me was another teacher number of less familiar sources/URLs, namely:
recruited by the British Council, Paul Louis, much younger
and less experienced in teaching than I, but very IT- Videos showing mouth movement:
literate: he had worked for two years as a programmer at international.ouc.bc.ca/pronunciation (video/sound
an IT company in the U.K. I have often had reason to be iles of problem sounds)
grateful for his skills.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 37

Texts for sentence stress:
http://pronunciation.englishclub.com/sentence- One was a failure to add an –(e)s to the third person
stress.htm singular present simple: in addition to my pedestrian but
http://pronunciation.englishclub.com/word- relatively effective PowerPoint show, which combined
stress.htm grammatical explanation (based on a variety of reference
and textbooks) and error analysis with group exercises,
Sound iles: Paul produced a game of alternative choices played at
http://www.indsounds.com/ (sound search) various levels of speed and dificulty.

English variations: Another area of student error was a failure to distinguish

www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/ between present simple and past simple, where we both
implemented similar techniques. Use of visuals proved
Games: highly effective, and there was considerable interest in
http://www.hillsborough.k12.nj.us/ my introductory display with timekeepers from a Roman
edlinkspowerpoint.htm sundial to a modern digital alarm clock.

Paul’s main IT tools were PowerPoint, Excel and, for The biggest challenge was the Conditional. Students
interactive exercises and games, Visual Basic. Some of claimed to be familiar with it but were unable in most
his creations can be found and copied from his website: cases to manipulate it in unscripted speech. Rosemary
www.paullouis.co.uk/english/ Aitken’s Teaching Tenses provided numerous stimuli for
PowerPoint-led group competitions. These attracted a lot
of student involvement, especially when they realised that
there would be prizes for the best sentences. The group
activity discussing how their university could be improved
led to animated debate, a surprising amount of which was
in English (at least what I could hear!).

When things went technically wrong, as they did from

time to time, students found themselves honing their
IT vocabulary in attempts to interpret between us and
technical and administrative staff.

At the end of the academic year 2003/4 it was gratifying to

hear students remark that our teaching had become more
effective and their learning more enjoyable as a result of
the use of IT.

At the start of 2004/5 the challenges include exploring

the capabilities of LNNU’s new IT projection facilities,
persuading them to accept Richard Cauldwell’s Streaming
Students in both our groups were referred to this Speech, and helping to persuade universities here to
Website, but, sadly, many students have limited access adopt Promethean’s latest interactive whiteboards.
to the Internet, unable to afford the time or money to go
to "Internet bars" (signiicantly, not cafés). In China, such
places also have a bad reputation, especially for women, IATEFL ANNUAL CONFERENCE
who make up well over 90% of our students.
CARDIFF 2005
An initial assessment had shown fairly clearly where my
main attention should lie. Like many Chinese students, Next year’s annual conference will be
my LNNU sophomores had extensive vocabularies and a held in Cardiff in Wales during April.
very good grounding in grammar for writing, which did not Keep an eye on the IATEFL website
always carry over into speaking. As one of my students for official dates and more details of
put it: "If we can avoid a problem, we do." Breathing a keynote speakers and the programme...
sigh of relief at having been so well trained in PowerPoint
by my former school and a CILT/Goethe-Institut course
and in use of screen materials by Promethean, I (and to
some extent Paul) set about creating teaching slide shows
tailored to my students’ problems. These were as always
largely due to source language interference, but of course
many will be all too familiar to teachers in countries where www.iatefl.org
languages other than Chinese are spoken.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 38

 CHEAP AS (COMPUTER) CHIPS - MULTIMEDIA DESIGN...

Multimedia Design on the

discover there are lots more that you never use and many

Cheap
of these have huge potential for materials design.

Have a look for the ones that look like two little globes, one
with two links over it and another with two arrows. If you
Nik Peachey, United Kingdom
highlight some text in a document and click on the one with
the links a window will appear this allows you quite simply
Nik has worked as an ELT Teacher, Teacher Trainer and
and quickly to link your document to websites, video or
ICT trainer for both British Council and International audio, either online or on your computer somewhere or to
House in schools around the world. He is also a materials another document, then when you, or you students, click
writer and has worked on a number of CD-ROM projects the text, the file you’ve linked to opens.
for British Council and Longman ELT and contributed both
teaching and training materials to a number of websites. Just this one simple tool can transform worksheets which
He is based in Naples, Italy and works for the British you were creating to print up for class into computer based
Council as Manager Teaching Websites: http://searcheng
lish.britishcouncil.org , http://www.teachingenglish.org.
materials which can exploit the whole range of authentic
uk, http://www.britishcouncil.org/languageassistant/ He
web based materials on the internet.
can be contacted at: [email protected]
If you have a look on the menu of toolbars for one called
Forms and click on it, you should see something like this:

A
s more and more multimedia and web-based
materials become a part of the standard language
course offer, there has been a growing feeling
among many teachers of a sense of disenfranchisement
from the process of lesson and materials design.
The first three icons on this little bar can be used to create
For many the idea of being an e-tutor who simply guides either gap-fill texts, true false questions or multiple choice
students through a set of ‘one size fits all’ materials has drop downs all of which can be simply programmed to
very little appeal and the thought of ambling round a deliver feedback to students. Just click the one you want,
computer room watching students click their way through say the first icon for a text entry (gap-fill or cloze in teacher
a set totally inauthentic texts as coloured icons bleep and speak), then click on the properties icon (the one with the
then inexplicably freeze up leaving the last thirty minutes little hand holding a card) and in the window that opens
of the lesson in tatters is their idea of a total nightmare. click on Add Help Text. This allows you to write in a short
text response which your students can get simply by
Of course what’s described above is a description of some pressing the F1 key on the top left of their keyboard. (As
of the worst case scenarios, but I’m sure many teachers long as you remember to click on the little padlock once
have looked at the glossy content on web pages and CD- you’ve finished designing your worksheet that is).
ROMs and thought ‘Yes, but if only they had done it like
this!’ or ‘I’m sure I could do that better, but…’ If all this sounds just a little too complicated for you, why not
try creating your own text reconstruction activity? I’m sure
Despite the rate of change the percentage of teachers every teacher has at some point sat with a pair of scissors
who actually have the technical skills and opportunity to cutting a text into strips of paper which our students then
get involved in the design of computer based materials is try to order as they blow around the room, fall on the floor
still relatively small, but that doesn’t have to be the case. or get accidentally ripped. This doesn’t have to be the
Sitting on nearly every teacher’s computer is a tool, which case though, all you have to do is get a Word version of
they already have and know how to use which can be used your text, and save one version of it on the computer with
to create their very own set of multimedia materials and the file name ‘exercise [name]’. Save a second copy as
that tool is MS Word. ‘exercise [name] answers’. Close the ‘answers’ file and go
back to you first file and then rearrange the text and save
Using Word it is possible to, easily and quickly, design a it. Using your little globe icon you can then create a link
whole range of interactivity and even incorporate authentic at the bottom of the exercise document to the answers
audio or video. document. If you remember to save both files as ‘Read
only’ you can use the exercise over and over again on
If this idea sounds attractive to you, it’s time to start the computer, students can check their own answers and
exploring your tool bar and finding out what all those little you never have to cut up paper again. If you combine
icons at the top of the screen can do. If you go to View (top this exercise with a link to an audio file, like a song, on
left) then down the menu to Toolbars, you may well the Internet and save the file onto a floppy disc, you then

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 39

have a really motivating authentic assignment that your
students can do for homework.

Of course there are some down sides to this. The materials

you produce will never look as good as a professionally
INCENSED? EXCITED? BORED?
Have you been annoyed, excited, bored,
produced package and the degree of interactivity will
never match that which can be created by a programmer frustrated or anything else by what you’ve
using sophisticated software. For students who are used to read in this newsletter? If so - we’d like to
being able to click all round the screen and expect exciting hear from you. Send your letters, comments,
animation, you can’t meet those expectations. You can articles, reviews or anything else to:
however, produce materials which incorporate authentic
materials, which draw on sources which are completely [email protected]
current and best of all which are tailored, to the personal
tastes, needs and interests of your students, which only
you as their teacher can be aware of.

As for you, this could also form your first step into what can
become the very compulsive and constantly developing
area of computer based materials design.

SCHOLARSHIPS...
The IATEFL Computer SIG is happy to THE COMPUTER SIG WEBSITE
announce that two travel grants (£250 each)
will be awarded to IATEFL Computer SIG Our website designer Geoff Taylor
members in order to assist them in attending (pictured below!) has recently
the Annual International Conference. completed a re-design of the Computer
SIG website which you can find at:
All IATEFL Computer SIG members are eligible
to apply for the grants although priority will be www.iateflcompsig.org.uk
given to WMS country members. Candidates
should be presenting for the Computer SIG at
the conference and be willing to write up their
presentation for the SIG’s newsletter.

For more information, email Sophie

Ioannou-Georgiou, Deputy Coordinator
& Acting Discussion Forum Moderator at
[email protected]

Geoff Taylor

www.iatefl.org
Thanks Geoff!

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 40

KEEPING IT FRESH...

The Today Page -

The technique introduced here applies the automating
capability of computers to the dual objective of (1)

‘PHPMYSQLCALL’ Spells
presenting students with selected materials and
challenges and (2) enlivening the relationship between the

Freshness
student and the CALL system by means of daily variation
in the presentation. It involves the use of the database
server MySQL, the server-side scripting language PHP,

David Mayo, Japan

a certain amount of effort, and a roughly equal amount of
satisfaction.

David Mayo teaches at Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University The Problem

Junior College in Fukuoka, Japan. His main interests are
"organic" CALL, data-driven learning by concordancing, The local-area network of Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University,
and workplace-style collaboration among individual in Fukuoka, Japan, hosts an internal CALL site of the
students. He can be contacted at [email protected] flexible kind mentioned above: web-based and locally
modifiable, since it was developed by the author. The site
currently contains about 1,200 original exercise problems,
including about 680 listening problems, as well as a small
Introduction number of original language puzzles, some reading pieces

T
he computer is not a robot and generic models, and an English-only bulletin board
teacher. CALL is not Conveniently (BBS). It takes its name, Mission CALL, from Fukuoka
Automated Language Learning, Jo Gakuin's nickname in the local community: Mission
despite the wishes of the efficiency School.
-minded. However, the computer as
a learning assistant can provide Given the common dichotomy between CALL-as-tutor and
valuable benefits to students and teachers by managing CALL-as-tool (Levy 1997; see also Field 2002), Mission
certain procedures automatically or even by making a CALL belongs in the tool category. However, that dichotomy
procedure feasible for the first time. is unsatisfactory, as it often leads to either-or discussions
of freedom versus control, or of creative production versus
Those who teach in schools with CALL systems in mechanical drill and instruction. Mission CALL really
place will probably have found that one of the greatest belongs in a third category not suggested by either tutor
advantages of such a system is the opportunity for students or tool; perhaps by the metaphor of a community centre
to learn and practise outside of class hours, at their own containing a gym and a library as well as a lounge. Apart
pace, according to individual needs which they or their from the lounge (the BBS), it strongly emphasises intake
teachers have recognised. If the system is designed to be and practice. Its exercises give the student feedback. Its
accessed over a network by web browser and is open to main purpose, of necessity, is to help low-intermediate
local modification, it will offer interesting possibilities not students build vocabulary and syntactic competence.
available with either a non-web system or one controlled However, it is neither a course nor a drilling system. It has
by an outside supplier. This article explores one of those no testing component. It is a varied but interconnected set
possibilities, but does so within the pedagogical horizon of online materials and challenges primarily intended for
of 'pre-network CALL' and not network-based language students to approach on their own. That makes it important
teaching (NBLT). not only to earn the student's confidence in the usefulness
of the site, but also to renew her interest in it from day to
From the perspective of second-language acquisition, it day. In structure and content, it attempts to minimise the
is significant that learners often interact with a computer sense of the computer's presence, which often comes to
program in pre-network CALL activities, but they usually the fore in students' responses to CALL activities (Field
interact with other people in NBLT activities. (Chapelle 2002). It provides multiple entry points to its contents
2000: 204) to accommodate different learning styles, and allows
communication and recreation to mingle with purposes of
Chapelle notes that pre-network CALL has not been study. However, there is another challenge to be met.
superseded, as the conventional term seems to imply, nor
is it demonstrably separate from NBLT. One might add that Mission CALL shares this liability with CALL systems
interaction with a computer programme that exists solely generally: that when exercises and materials are always
to help the student focus on the vocabulary and syntax of available they tend to become boring. This is not simply a
the target language is sometimes preferable to activities matter of insuficient volume. Experienced Internet users
fraught with communicative aims, social dynamics, and know that familiarity breeds ennui well before the last bit
exposure to the language models of other learners. of content on a site has actually been consumed, and very

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 41

soon after the pleasing visual design has made its irst 3. Pointers to more detailed information and essential
impression. Merely knowing what there is to be found, and resources.
where to ind it, can be enough to make it pall.
PHP, MySQL, and CALL
No doubt students ought to mine a CALL site thoroughly
and repetitively for their own good, and some do. However, PHP, like HTML, is a plain-text scripting language used
all students are likely to welcome a degree of variation and in web pages. However, whereas HTML support is built
freshness in their daily experience as users of the site. The into browsers, PHP requires an interpreter (php.exe, on
problem is inding a way to achieve those results without Windows) running on the server. Internet hosting providers
condemning oneself to perform a manual editing task offer that as a matter of course now, and the administrator
every day. of a school LAN should be willing to install PHP if it is
technically feasible (please get details from the outside
The Solution sources listed below). There are no technical issues with
the client (user) system, since PHP does its work on the
In the case of Mission CALL, the solution emerged from server. Unlike HTML, the PHP language has only one
a colleague's chance remark about something called kind of tag: <? instructions here ?>. Like HTML, it can be
'PHP and MySQL'. He explained what those two things written in a simple text editor, but a good HTML editor will
were and showed how he was using them together to minimise confusion by showing tags and other elements
update the announcements on a website without touching in distinctive styles. A page containing PHP code must
the pages themselves, simply by editing the contents ultimately be saved with the ile extension .php, not .htm.
of an online database. After that it remained only to
study an introductory book on the subject and do some
experimenting, and in April, 2002, Mission CALL acquired
a 'Today page' that automatically presents different
materials each day. The writing of materials, as usual,
deied automation.

Mission CALL is accessible only on the campus of Fukuoka

Jo Gakuin, but the reader can refer to an Internet edition of
the Today page while reading on about the technique that
makes it work. That address is www.todaypage.org. Like
the private edition, the public one consists of some short
reading pieces, including a trivia-quiz question to which the
answer appears the following day, and a small selection of
exercises. In the private edition, these include listening-
comprehension materials. All materials change daily when
the browser is launched or refreshed for the irst time that
day. In degree of input 'push' as outlined by Hunter (2003),
this kind of presentation does not fall at any marked point
on the scale (available – ready – spring-loaded – pushed
MySQL is a database programme that works hand-in-glove
– constant-feed). An automated PHP-MySQL page waits
with PHP. Commercial providers commonly sell MySQL
to be visited, but then its daily contents put themselves
access as an option, and users either log in to enter data or
forward without waiting to be triggered; that is, the page
upload it in the appropriate format. PHP can do a number
pushes a variety of contents to people who have elected
of things without MySQL; for example, the automatic date
to see what the day will bring. In that sense, it is very much
display at the top of the Today page (Figure 1) relies
like an online newspaper.
on an internal PHP function alone. However, MySQL
The rest of this article will be devoted to explaining how adds the capability of replacing various page elements
a web-based CALL site can add a page that rewards the such as text, graphics, and hyperlink addresses. This is
user's attention with different language-learning materials possible because a piece of PHP code can cause itself
every day, though not necessarily one requiring a large to be replaced with the contents of a speciied database
supply of materials. It will assume a basic understanding ield. Combining this capability with PHP's date and time
of HTML, the stuff that webs are made of, and of database functions makes it possible to automate the replacement.
terminology (record, ield, etc.), but none of PHP or MySQL. PHP, MySQL, and the Apache HTTP server software
It will provide the reader with the following things: that will enable PHP locally (indispensable for testing)
are all available for downloading on the Internet, as is
1. A brief introduction to PHP and MySQL and an idea of PhpMyAdmin, a handy front-end programme for managing
what they can do for a CALL site. MySQL databases (see Appendix). It is advisable to have
copies of all four installed locally on the developer's
2. Examples of PHP code that will automate parts of a web computer. Please refer to the respective Internet sites for
page. terms of use.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 42

As with any database, the irst step in working with MySQL is designing the tables: deciding what items of data each
record will comprise and what type of ield will be needed for each item. PhpMyAdmin makes it easy to change things
later, but in any case the design will relect a decision as to the parts of the page that are to be replaced. On the public
Today page, MySQL supplies a total of seventeen parts from three tables. For example, the daily quotation that appears
under the subheading "Words to keep" has its own table, since it requires only a small number of ields. Three ields
supply the quotation itself; the author's name; and the title of the work, respectively. When a ield is empty, as our title
ield sometimes is, the PHP remains invisible and takes no space on the page. Please note that viewing the source code
of a browser page will not reveal any sign of PHP, because the code will have been replaced on the server.

Figure 1 - The public edition of the Today page

Another table contains ields for a trivia question; a short answer; a long answer written to stand without the question;
and a general heading. These supply the heading and the block of text just below the quotation, as well as the two
questions and one answer in 'Toady's teaser for today'. The two questions come from consecutive records in the table;
the heading and text block below the quotation come from yet another record in the same table. HTML style attributes
can be applied either on the page itself outside the PHP code, or in the database ield; hence the bolding of the heading
(done on the page) and the italicisation of words within the trivia answer (done in the database).

A third table devoted to 'Toady's triathlon for today' contains HTML links to individual exercise pages and to animated
graphics that decorate the links. A daily shift in the selection of records enables an exercise link and graphic to move
across the page for three days before disappearing. The exercise pages, in turn, lend themselves well to inventive CALL
site design. These are generated by authoring programmes in the Hot Potatoes and TexToys sets developed by Martin
Holmes and his associates. They are pages of XHTML and JavaScript which are capable of great enrichment by the
insertion of links to graphics, sounds, and other pages. The PHP that manages Toady's triathlon, like the JavaScript that
provides interactivity in the output of these authoring programmes, gives heightened vitality to the most vital elements
of a web: the links, which 'present choice and embody transition' (DeWitt 1999: 117).

The key to shifting the selection of contents automatically every day, while selecting different records from the same
table at different places on the page, is the inclusion of at least one other ield in each MySQL table: a ield to hold
sequential numbers representing days of the year or days of the week (days of the month become problematic). A PHP
instruction can then call for today's record, or can call for the record containing a value that is larger or smaller than
today's by a speciied amount. The item below the quotation on the Today page is currently timed to appear about two
weeks after the related teaser and answer, by way of revisiting and expanding on the subject matter and vocabulary.
When the supply of data runs out, the page can be made to start re-using it (see Figure 2).

There is no need to prepare an endless supply of data for the page. The selection of contents can be re-started at any
time, although care is needed with our Today page to keep faithful users from missing the answer to a teaser quiz. The
page can, for that matter, include some contents from tables that cycle through seven records every week and need
no restarting. Where the public edition of the Today page always shows its mascot catching flies, the private edition
displays a public-domain graphic that changes every day (something that is easier to supply than a year's worth of

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 43

original writing). It also includes a section for timely announcements about campus events and the like, which is not
automated at all but it is manually edited for each occasion. When the student finishes an exercise opened from the
Today page, she can exit to another page in the heart of Mission CALL where similar exercises are always available. By
adding touches like those, as well as using multiple MySQL tables and selecting different records for different purposes,
it is possible to give one's students a page that greets them each day with a refreshing sense of vitality.

From this point on, original ideas will be the best guide. Next let's see how PHP and MySQL play their parts in
implementing those ideas.

Examples
Figure 2 shows how PHP can serve content to a web page, first by itself and then in combination with MySQL. Irrelevant
HTML has been omitted, and essential '// comments' have been added.

Figure 2 - PHP code in a web page

A good introduction to PHP syntax and to the setting-up and use of PHP with MySQL can be found in instructional books
such as Julie Meloni's PHP: Fast & Easy Web Development (2000), which comes with a CD-ROM containing the PHP,
MySQL, and Apache programmes as well as examples of PHP code, a list of date and time functions, and so on.

Conclusion
The introduction and maintenance of a Today page on the Mission CALL site at Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University confirms
that PHP and MySQL can serve to enliven a CALL site by supplying automatically varied contents. Moreover, casual
observation of students' usage of Mission CALL over more than two years tentatively confirms that many do visit the
Today page during independent use of the site (it is not the top page, at present). In future, an attempt will be made to
study usage systematically with the aid of visitor-tracking software.

Implementing the technique demonstrated here entails certain tasks, such as the configuration of the server to support
PHP, which may prove daunting to many teachers and school administrative staff. An alternative to overcoming those
difficulties internally, if organisational policy and funds allow, is to place the special page on a third-party Internet server
that provides PHP and MySQL support, and then link out to it from pages on the local CALL site. Those who would like
to link to the public edition of the Today page are welcome to do so on an as-is basis.

Tutor or tool? CALL need not dispense with either of those models altogether, but PHP and MySQL can help make

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 44

a CALL site something better still: an online community
centre that serves the user with opportunities for exercise
and straightforward study as well as interpersonal
communication, in a fresh and stimulating environment.

Resources
Resources that proved essential or very useful in the
conception and development of the Today page are
listed below. Please note that several of the links are also EVENTS... EVENTS... EVENTS...
available at www.todaypage.org/about.htm. The respective
sites contain full information as well as downloads.
- Our irst ielded electronic
discussion – 29 January – 5th
th

• Meloni, J. 2000. PHP: Fast & Easy Web February, 2005

Development. Roseville (Calif.): Prima. (Book
with CD-ROM containing PHP, MySQL, and The topic of the discussion will be “The
Apache) future of CALL” and it will be hosted
• PHP: http://www.php.net/ by Stephen Bax, Canterbury Christ
Church University College.
• MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/

• Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/ - “Independently Online” – 26th February

• PhpMyAdmin: http://www.phpmyadmin.net A one-day “hands-on” event at Reading

• Hot Potatoes: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/
College organised jointly with the
halfbaked/ Learner Independence SIG. Featured
speakers/workshop leaders include
• TexToys: http://www.cict.co.uk/software/ Barbara Sinclair, Gavin Dudeney and
textoys/
Nicky Hockly.

- “TT and IT” – 5th April

References
Our Cardiff PCE event organised
jointly with the TTED SIG. Topics dealt
Chapelle, C. 2000. “Is network-based learning CALL?".
In M. Warschauer and R. Kern (eds.). Network-based with are In-service IT Training and
Language Teaching: Concepts and Practice 204–228. Online Teacher Training. Featured
Cambridge: Cambridge.
speakers/workshop leaders include
DeWitt, S. 1999. ‘Defining links’. In S. DeWitt and K. Gary Motteram, Paul Hullock and
Strasma (eds.). Contexts, Intertexts, and Hypertexts
117–154. Cresskill (NJ): Hampton. Robert O’Dowd.
Field, M. 2002. ‘Towards a CALL pedagogy: student
use and understanding’. In P. Lewis (ed.). The
Changing Face of CALL: A Japanese Perspective 3–17. For more information about these events
Tokyo: Swets & Zeitlinger.
and anything else connected with the
Hunter, L. 2003. ‘The semiotics of CALL’. CALL Review Computer SIG, please visit our website at
Summer 2003: 54-58.
www.iatelcompsig.org.uk
Levy, M. 1997. Computer-Assisted Language Learning:
Context and Conceptualization. Oxford: Clarendon.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 45

 BOOK REVIEW... BOOK REVIEW...

Diana Laurillard- Rethinking

the widespread praise for the “e-university”, which she

University Teaching: A
considers to have been introduced without the kind of
consideration given to pedagogical models of teaching and

Conversational Framework
learning within a mass education system. The first sections

for the Effective Use of

of her book outline her indebtness to Dearing’s humanistic
characterisation of the university as an institution whose

Learning Technologies.
purpose is to “enable a society to make progress through an
understanding of itself and its world”. These ideals should
not be undermined by “new forms of competition”. Timely
evidence of Laurillard’s view is provided by the recent
2002. 2nd Edition. Routledge: London and New announcement that the UK government’s £62m e-university
York. 268pp. ISBN 0-415-25679-8. needs to be rethought after it failed to recruit enough
students or attract adequate private investment. Following
Michael Thomas is currently Associate Professor a review of the UKeU’s performance, which found that only
in English Communication at Nagoya University of
Commerce and Business in Japan. He holds a BA and
900 students had been recruited in the institution’s first year
Ph.D. in English, an M.Ed. in Educational Technology
- far fewer than the target which is believed to be over 5,000 -
and EFL and an MBA in Educational Management. He
the board ordered a programme of restucturing. A statement
can be contacted at: [email protected]
blamed “changes in the financial market” but the UKeU has
been criticised for pouring money into its operating “platform”
for online learning rather than the content of courses. This

T
he first edition of Rethinking University Teaching was of course is precisely Laurillard’s point. Academia is being
widely acclaimed as a compulsory text for all university forced to accommodate ICTs but only as a consequence of
teachers and educational managers in 1992. During “the pressure for reduced costs, for greater scale and scope,
the decade that followed the publication of the first edition, and for innovation through technology” (p. 3).
they have seen innumerable changes in their discipline, as
developments have quickly changed the provision of teaching This then is not a further addition to the already lengthy book
and learning. Simple Gopher browsers have been replaced lists championing the new technology as a re-branding of
by integrated software and CBL authoring environments. HE, so much as a carefully considered engagement with how
Data access and transmission have been revolutionised by educationalists should consider the process of teaching and
Internet wireless LANs and the emergence of the “laptop” learning prior to engaging with the new technology. The basic
and “e-university” initiatives. This technology has provided premise of the book is that “university teachers must take
the infrastructure for increased student participation, life- the main responsibility for what and how students learn” (p.
long learning in developing as well as developed countries, 1). Of course, Laurillard recognises that this view applies to
and the spread of distance learning programmes using the undergraduate mass market more than the postgraduate
ICT (Information Communication Technologies) around the sector, where “it is quite possible to argue that students
globe. The second edition of Laurillard’s book discusses the should take responsibility for their own learning” and that
implications of these new learning environments, as well as “they should use the university as a set of resources largely
responding to a number of criticisms that were levelled at the under their control” (p. 2). As the title suggests, Laurillard’s
“conversational framework” model that was introduced in the model is based on a conversational framework, or dialogical
first edition. approach, between students and teachers.

Laurillard’s critique of higher education is far-reaching, and Like the 1992 edition, the book is divided into three main
at the outset of the book she calls for the basic premises parts. Part One, “What Students Need from Learning
of the academic system to be changed. The new initiatives Technologies”, discusses theories of student learning and
prompted by increasingly sophisticated ICTs serve to what academics and students can hope to acquire from
highlight the methodological deficiencies of the current educational technology. Part Two, “Analysing the Media
system. By this she means that university teachers must for Learning and Teaching”, examines individual methods
understand more about what constitutes good teaching and computer-based learning. Part Three, “The Design
practice. Laurillard’s rather scathing view of the “wretched” Methodology”, focuses on the design of learning materials
traditional lecture format is no doubt partly explained by her and the context of their use, concluding with some a useful
involvement with the UK’s Open University, Europe’s largest design for an “effective organisational structure”.
educational provider and pioneer in the use of ICT and CBL
for distance learning, where she is Professor of Educational The first four chapters about student learning outline a notion
Technology. that is based on the role of the teacher as “mediator” of the
learning process. The ideal student’s perspective on learning
To her credit, however, she is equally dismissive of is described in terms of a complex and individual process
that is above all active. The conversational model, which

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 46

Laurillard also describes as “phenomenographic”, is akin practical and experiential level. These levels are bridged
to a dialogue which has four aspects: discursive, adaptive, by the two participants engaging in a process of adaptation
interactive and reflective. The concern of university teaching (theory to practice) and reflection (theory in the light of
should be with how to make student learning possible. practice). This process supports Laurillard’s esteemed
Traditionally far too much attention has been paid towards notion of the learning community. In such an organisation,
“imparted” or “decontextualised” knowledge which ignores universities would maintain a professional teaching focus
its “context-dependent” status. This type of situated learning that parallels their professional conception of research, as
relies on “naturally embedded activites” in order to make well as orienting the curriculum toward long-term high-level
sense of abstract knowledge for multiple contexts. cognitive skills. Moreover, academics need a collective
R&D program that builds design tools, or generic learning
Although primary responsibility resides with the teacher, activity models (GLAMs) for supporting students in learning
Laurillard also considers what students must do in order the skills of scholarship. University managers must foster
to facilitate learning: apprehend the structure of discourse, the conditions for this different approach while university
interpret the forms of representation, act on descriptions teachers must become researchers in teaching.
of the world, use feedback, and reflect on the “goal-action-
feedback-cycle”. These five areas are interdependent and For an EFL audience, Part III is of more immediate value than
form the basis of successful “mathemagenic” activities the methodological strategy outlined in Parts I and II. Indeed,
– those that “give birth to learning, and encouraging these EFL practioners unlike those from more mainstream academic
is an appropriately student-centred way of thinking about disciplines, have developed by stressing the importance
the teacher’s task” (p. 61). In the conclusion to Part I, of teacher training qualifications above that of research
Laurillard uses this theoretical review to generate a workable credibility. The methodological concerns of Laurillard’s book,
teaching strategy. Rejecting instructional design theory, and specifically the conversational framework, are also familiar to
constructivism (“which does not offer a detailed link between any language teacher who has understood the implications
teaching, student activity and interaction with the subject”), of communicative language teaching and constructivism.
Laurillard chooses the more “co-operative” and “democratic” Laurillard’s conclusions may be more apposite to an largely
learning style offered by “phenomenography”. This approach, “western” academic audience of teachers and learners, in
which allows the student as well as the teacher to give full that it lacks a broader intercultural perspective on theoretical
representation to his/her conceptions, is best represented as attitutdes to pedagogy and the use of ICT. The culture of my
an “iterative dialogue between teacher and student (rather classroom of Japanese undergraduates varies immeasurably
than on the student) focused on a topic goal”. from a group of undergraduate students in a UK university,
and it is somewhat surprising that this cultural perspective
Part II discusses five aspects of the conversational is not addressed, given distance learning’s deconstruction
framework which overcome the limitations of a transmissive of geographical barriers. The omissions of Laurillard’s text,
epistemology: narrative media, interactive media, adaptive however, provide an insight into how further research on
media, communicative media and productive media. One culturally specific approaches can help to integrate lCT with a
shortcoming of Laurillard’s conversational framework in the considered pedagogical framework to support it. Indeed she
first edition was its failure to focus on student interaction and makes the point that too much research in CBT and ICT has
group work. The latest edition addresses the issue, as well been concerned with design models and not enough with the
as adding a number of diagrams and visualisations of the evaluation of their effectiveness.
subject matter, so as to aid clarification.
Laurillard provides a rigourous approach to the
Part III on design methodology, focuses on the development methodological underpinnings of educational technology,
of teaching materials, the learning context, and an effective much needed in a field where many publications all too often
organisational infrastructure. The first chapter on developing adopt an uncritical acceptance of the connection between
courses, including writing learning objectives and the design e-learning, reducing costs and improving quality. The lesson
of software interfaces, is by and large the same as the earlier is that teachers have not invented many of the technologies
edition, but with some re-labelling and additions. The next they use in the classroom, but rather adapted them in the
chapter, ‘Setting up the learning context’, concerns the service of the transmission model of learning. An alternative
course as experienced by students, with which successful approach has to invent a range of formats that better use
uses of media must combine. It has sections on preparing this complex technology in the interests of the conversational
students, integrating media, assessment, and logistics. framework. The implications is that universities will maintain
There is a section on nurturing epistemological values in their competitive edge against the knowledge industries
students; inculcating in them an appropriate conception through the maintenance of their core values (evident here
of learning; and a new section on the features of Virtual in her frequent references to Dearing) – including research-
Learning Environments (VLEs). based teaching and a curriculum that provides for the long-
The conversational framework is potentially more term cognitive needs of individuals. Laurillard’s book will
progressive than the “transmission model” as well as being rightly remain of value to educational technologists, who
more compatible with the requirements of the “reflective require a greater understanding of pedagogical theory, as
practioner”. The framework is an iterative dialogue between well as educational managers, who would benefit from a
teachers and students which operates on two levels: the more dialogical approach to the needs of both faculty and
discursive, theoretical, conceptual level, and the active, students in the face of increasing market pressures.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 47

Dictionary Talk...

Where to go if the Dictionary

The second age dawned with the computer. In the 1970s,

doesn’t Tell you Enough

Sue Atkins and John Sinclair saw that the computer could
revolutionise corpus use, and initiated the COBUILD
project to explore the idea. Rather than starting from their
own ideas about the word and what other dictionaries
Adam Kilgarriff, United Kingdom
had to say, lexicographers would base their analysis
of a word purely on the objective evidence, which the
computer would furnish them with, in the form of a fat
Adam Kilgarriff lives and works in the UK. He can be wodge of computer printout (computers existed, yes, but
contacted at [email protected] only in air-conditioned rooms tended by men in white
coats; the era of computers on desks was still far away).
The computer printout would be a Key-Word-In-Context

I
(KWIC) concordance, in which there was one line of text
am writing an essay about my career plans, and I want
extracted for each occurrence of the word in the corpus
to talk about goals. How does the word work? What
with the word of interest, e.g., goal, in the middle of the
sorts of sentences might I construct around it, with what
line, as in Fig 2 (see facing page).
collocates?
This is immediately useful. Just from the first few lines, we
The current range of EFL dictionaries aim to help, and
can see that we attain, lack and aspire to goals; that things
are well-designed, sophisticated tools which specify
are subjugated or subordinated to them; that there are
grammatical patterns and collocates, and show the user
eventual goals and goals ahead. This is rich information.
a range of example sentences. Often that will be enough.
The COBUILD lexicographers worked through their wodge,
But they are limited to a couple of column inches for a word
identifying the patterns and collocates and distilling them
like goal (in which they must cover all of its meanings) and
into a dictionary entry.
sometimes they just do not cover the case the student is
interested in. When that happens, where should they go
The first COBUILD dictionary was published in 1987. Since
next? One option is that they should go where the people
then, KWIC concordances have transformed lexicography.
who wrote the dictionary went themselves: to the corpus.
All aspiring and innovative dictionary projects have
gathered, begged or borrowed a corpus (and others have
The Four Ages of Corpus Lexicography claimed to use one even though they didn’t!) Computers
have arrived on everyone’s desk, ever faster and more
Lexicographers face the issue of identifying how words powerful. Concordancing tools were developed which let
behave every day, and, as they have realized for over a the user call up and sort concordances instantly.
hundred years, the proper place to go to find out more is
a corpus (plural: corpora).. A corpus is a set of texts as And corpora have got bigger and bigger. This has been
used as a resource for linguistic or literary study. fabulous. The larger part of the COBUILD corpus was
compiled using a corpus of 8 million words. That gave
In the first age of corpus lexicography, before the computer, around 400 instances of goal, a lot to read, but does it
corpus lexicography involved lots of paper and filing. An cover all the patterns that the word occurs in? It is hard
early and innovative exponent was James Murray, who to say. A word like chug has just 28 occurrences in the
compiled the Oxford English Dictionary with the help of 100-million word BNC so can only be expected to have
over 20 million index cards, each with a citation for a word. something less than five in 8 million words. Bigger corpora
Before writing an entry, he would find the index cards for a are great because you have lots of evidence even for the
word and study the examples of usage they had on them. less frequent words (and the highly skewed ‘Zipfian’
distribution of words in the vocabulary ensures that most
words are ‘less frequent’).

In practice, the more data you look at the more patterns

you find, so the discriminating lexicographer needs lots of
data: they then have a range of patterns which may or may
not be worthy of inclusion on the dictionary, and that is a
choice for them to make. But … how is the lexicographer
going to find time to read all those corpus lines, and keep
the patterns in their head for long enough to do a good job
of distilling them? The bigger the corpus, the harder the

James Murray surrounded by his corpus

problem. The answer brings us to the third age of corpus
lexicography: summary statistics.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 48

 Fig. 2 - KWIC concordance for goal

Summary Statistics

The basic idea is simple. We get the computer to count all the words that occur frequently in the vicinity of the
word of interest and present the results to the user. In the paper that inaugurated the third age, Church and Hanks
1989, the display, for words occurring in the neighborhood of save in a 40-million word corpus, was as in Fig 3.

Fig. 3

This isn’t bad. We have been saved the labor of struggling through several thousand corpus instances, and have been
pointed to saving forests, lives, jobs, dollars and face. The collocates have been sorted by Mutual Information, which
does quite a good job of putting the linguistically interesting collocates at the top of the list. (In fact it tends to over-
emphasize rare items at the expense of common ones, but we can apply an adjustment to address that problem.)

Summary statistics have played a role in lexicography in the 1990s and 2000s, but rather less than might have been
expected, given the time savings they offer. Why might that be?

If we look at the table above, we can immediate see various irritants. We have both live and lives – why were they
not rationalized into a single item? $1.2 and your are just junk, and even for the most efficient user, it wastes time to
scan extra items that offer nothing. Enormous, annually, estimated and thousands are little better: there may be some
linguistic significance to them occurring in the vicinity of save, but it will be objects of the verb that they modify rather
than the verb itself, and the relation to save is indirect.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 49

With a little knowledge of grammar, a person can promptly organize a list like the above according to the relevant
grammatical relations, weeding out the junk along the way. But – does it have to be a person?

Another field that has been shifting apace is computational linguistics (also known as language technology, or language
engineering, or natural (as opposed to computer) language processing). This field has, amongst its goals, automatic
translation and question-answering, and, more humbly, the automatic discovery of grammatical structure. People in
computational linguistics now can do a fair job of identifying grammatical relations (at least for much-studied languages
like English).

Word Sketching

With computational linguistics techniques to hand, the fourth (and current) age dawns. We can now draw a ‘sketch’ – a
one-page account of grammatical and collocational behavior – for a word as in Fig 4.

Fig. 4 - Word sketch for goal (reduced to fit in article)

The word sketch is organized according to grammatical relations, with one list for collocates in each different relation.
The relation names (on blue backgrounds) head each list. Collocates are listed according to the grammatical relation

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 50

they occur in. In contrast to Fig 3, there is no junk:
everything is there for an evident linguistic reason.
The first number is the actual number of occurrences of
the collocation (taken from the British National Corpus
(BNC); all data used here is from the BNC.) The second Ima g i n e
number is the salience statistic, used for sorting (a variant

h a t
on Mutual Information). When working online, the user

w
can click on the number and they are then shown the
KWIC concordance for the collocation, so if they are
unsure what a word is doing in the word sketch, they can
promptly find out.

your
Here, the items are lemmas (dictionary headwords) rather
than word forms, so data for goal and goals are merged.
A ‘part of speech tagger’ has been applied to work out, for
example, where post is a verb (“post the letter”) and where
a noun (“goal post”). The word sketch as a whole is for

r t
the noun goal.

Word sketches were first used for the Macmillan English

Dictionary for Advanced Learners, and are now being used
at Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury Publishing.
They changed the way the lexicographers used the corpus. ad v e
l d
Rather than start with a KWIC concordance for the word,

o u
they went straight to the word sketch, as that summarized

w
most of what they needed the concordances for.

Goals occur, of course, in sport as well as life. The word

sketch highlights the ambiguity. Scanning the ‘object-of’
list, if we score, concede, disallow, net or kick goals, we are

look
talking sport; if we achieve, pursue, attain or reach them,
life. England football fans will be glad to see England
standing alone in the ‘possessor’ relation to goals!

Back to the Student

like
Will this help the student? Maybe. Earlier tools for corpus
lexicography would not have been so useful, as it took
more expertise to read the corpus lines and distill the
linguistically useful facts; moreover heavy-duty computers

. .
were required so there was little practical possibility. Now

her e.
the tools mean the output is more user-friendly, almost
like a dictionary entry, and we have the web: heavy duty
computers are still required, but they can hum away
happily in cyberspace without the student needing to
think about them. Word sketches are an appropriate tool
only for advanced learners, or for students and teachers
who want to delve deeper into linguistics and the English
language; for them, it may well prove a direct route to what
they want to know about a word.

Word sketches can be explored at http://

www.sketchengine.co.uk
call Gavin to arrange an
advert for the next issue of
the CALL Review...

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 51

 may hinder opportunities for communicative interaction.
DEVELOPING MULTIMEDIA LEARNWARE...
Secondly, Salaberry concludes that the new technologies

A Rationale for the

have a range of inherent attributes which make them effective
and relevant for a wide range of learning outcomes. Brett

Development of Multimedia
(1998) elaborates on this, suggesting that CBL materials have

Learnware in ELF
the potential to combine and deliver an integrated environment
using different source media. Consequently, in relation to
question three, Salaberry considers the important role of the
“pre-“ and “post-activities” which contextualise the learning
Michael Thomas, Japan
activities (p. 51). The inal question concerns the eficient use
of inancial and material resources. Salaberry asks whether
Michael Thomas is currently Associate Professor in English
the extra investment of time, inances and effort from teachers
Communication at Nagoya University of Commerce and
and administrators has real value.
Business in Japan. He holds a BA and Ph.D. in English,
an M.Ed. in Educational Technology and EFL and an MBA Based on these methodological principles, Kennedy and
in Educational Management. He can be contacted at: McNaught (1997) outline a ive-point guide related to the key
[email protected] features of effective teaching and learning in a multimedia
environment:

Introduction - Good teaching practice

T
- Emphasis on independence
his article focuses on the development of one piece of - Clear goals
computer-based learning (CBL) using the Internet as an - Appropriate assessment
interactive multimedia environment. By relecting on - Appropriate workload
the design process, the aims and objectives of the learnware,
learner needs, learner goals and learner situations, a Watts (1997), moreover, identiies the main aspects of
rationale for the learning materials will be outlined. A brief multimedia materials that can be used to emphasize their
discussion of ive areas of the CBL materials design process superiority over other CBL materials:
will be identiied in what follows: the role of CBL in relation
to existing pedagogical practices (Brett, 1998; Salaberry, - Emphasise problem-solving activities
2001); effective teaching and learning in a multimedia learning - Encourage learner input
environments (Brett, 2000; Kennedy and McNaught, 1997; - Provide interactive tasks
Watts, 1997); motivation (Chun and Plass, 1997); evaluation - Use graphics and other visual media
(Brett, 1997); and design criteria for CBL (Hubbard, 1996; - Include orientation activities
Phillips, 1997). - Use help systems and messaging to provide user
support. (p. 5)
Salaberry (2001) asks a number of important questions for
our discussion of the development of CBL: One further key area of a rationale to consider is motivation.
Crookes and Schmidt (1991) set out some general principles
1. Is increased technological sophistication correlated to of student motivation in a second language environment:
increased effectiveness to achieve pedagogical objectives?
- Relationships between motivation and the
2. What technical attributes speciic to the new technologies cognitive and metacognitive processing of
can be proitably exploited for pedagogical purposes? second language stimuli
- Learning tasks and activities which may increase
3. How can new technologies be successfully integrated into or decrease motivation
the curriculum? - Decisions about the content of the learning
experience
4. Do new technologies provide for an eficient use of human
- Out-of-class long-term factors. (p. 483)
and material resources?
One standard reason for using multimedia is of course
The most important point is that the technology should serve
that it increases student motivation, as a result of a more
a pedagogical purpose. Tools should only be used when
stimulating learning environment in which input is more
a series of speciic “pedagogical objectives” indicate that
comprehensible and accessible. It is equally true, however,
they are appropriate to the learning environment. In a SAC,
that multimedia materials are often designed to be used in
for example, CBL materials may allow students to call up a
an autonomous setting where students are “self-directed”.
diverse range of multimedia materials in a stimulating and
Given these needs, the question of evaluating multimedia
lexible fashion, direct to their laptop with a wireless Internet
CBL materials arises. In Fig. 1 Chapelle (2000, pp. 55-57)
connection. In a classroom learning environment with twenty-
provides a useful measure of “task appropriateness”:
ive students, on the other hand, the use of desktop computers

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 52

 CRITERIA DESCRIPTION
Language learning potential The degree of opportunity present for beneficial focus on form
Learner fit The amount of opportunity for engagement with language under appropriate conditions given
learner characteristics.
Meaning focus The extent to which the learner’s attention is directed towards the meaning of the language.
Authenticity The degree of correspondence between the CALL activity and the target language activities of
interest to learners out of the classroom.
Positive impact The positive effects of the CALL activity on those who participate in it.
Practicality The adequacy of resources to support the use of CALL activity.

Fig. 1 - Chapelle’s (2000) Model of Call Task Appropriateness

Drawing on the work of Richards and Rogers (1986), Hubbard produces a three-stage framework concerned with
approach, design and procedure. By approach Hubbard means that the pedagogical methodology should be evident
in the structural design and this will determine the type of tasks, and such factors as the relationship between student,
teacher and computer.

For design, Hubbard’s model identiies the key categories of Learner Variables and Syllabus, with the learner positioned
at the centre of the process. With this focus, the categories of Language Dificulty, Program Dificulty and Content can
be determined. Language dificulty refers to the instructions for the learners, with program dificulty being connected to
navigational elements. The category of content is best clariied with reference to program and learner focus. Content is
concerned with the main objectives of the Syllabus. Program Focus concerns the main level of the exercises, such as
text, audio or video. Learner Focus relates to the development of speciic subskills, such as reading comprehension,
writing or listening.

Procedural issues are related to realisation of the learning materials and activities. Identifying the different types of
exercise is once component of this area. The other variables concern the way in which these learning activities are
realised and supported. Presentational Scheme deals with the actual realisation of the exercises depending on control
variables such as learner proile. Screen Layout is another factor inluenced by such concerns. Control Options refers to
the ability of the learner to navigate through the learnware, using sequential or hierarchical paths for example. The two
key elements of Feedback and Help options denotes responses of the materials to users, in terms of the structure and
detail of answers or in response to different levels of learner dificulty.

Furthermore, in The Developer’s Guide to Interactive Multimedia (1997), Phillips outlines six key factors to consider in
the pre-design phase:

1. Undertake a thorough course review

2. Keep the project small and focused
3. The CBL must have appeal for the users
4. It must be lexible and portable
5. Adopt a modular approach so as to ease the development process. (p. 14-17)

In order to effectively incorporate these elements, Phillips outlines an Incremental Protoyping Model of Software
Development (p. 38).

FIG. 2 - THE INCREMENTAL MODEL OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 53

An alternative model of “incremental” development is shown for IMM (Interactive Multimedia) in Fig. 3:

FIG. 3 THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Taken together, Hubbard’s detailed “approach, design and procedure” model and Phillips’ “incremental model of
software development”, provide a thorough engagement with the variables necessary for a considered multimedia
design process.

The Multimedia Lesson Plan

A series of interlinked Internet documents consisting of seven learning tasks have been chosen to examine the rationale.
The web-based CBL materials were chosen for the following reasons:

1. Relevance. The lesson plan is available in Microsoft Word. This document functions as a “launch pad” for the
Internet pages which are opened by clicking on the hyperlinks in the Lesson Plan’s Tasks menu.

2. Familiarity. On a weekly basis, students use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and an Internet browser.

3. Shelf-life and support. The CBL materials will be primarily designed for Netscape Navigator 4.7. Navigator is
subject to continual improvement and support is available from a wide range of sources.

4. Integrated Environment. The Internet supports text, images, sound and audio in an integrated multimedia
environment.

As indicated, the CBL materials will be hosted in the Assignments section of the ECA course site on the Blackboard
Learning System. Blackboard can function as a complimentary multimedia learning platform for the CBL materials as
it:

1. Enhances student-to-student and faculty-to-student communication

2. Enables student-centred teaching approaches

3. Provides 365/24/7 accessibility to course materials

4. Reduces “administrivia” around course management

Students use Bb for all of their university courses and it encourages the development of a wide-range of computer skills,
many of which are precisely apposite for using multimedia learning materials. Its Internet environment encourages
students to develop competence in a number of areas, including discussion forums to practice writing and reading
skills.

Having considered the situational context of the CBL materials in the Bb course administration system, Fig. 5 outlines a
rationale for the tasks in more detail using Hubbard’s variables. Task 1 begins with learners opening the Lesson Plan in
the Assignments section of their ECA course in the Blackboard Learning System. A Word document will open showing
the list of menu tasks in a format familiar to all ECA students. An attractive colour-coding system is used throughout the
lesson plans to establish a connection in the mind of students. The page is written in HTML and requires students to
read a short passage about the Japanese city of Kyoto. This text will be used again in Tasks 2 and 3. Students have to
interview a partner about their impressions of Japanese culture and complete a short piece of writing in the text box. By
clicking on the SUBMIT button, the text will be sent via an e-mail form to the teacher.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 54

 VARIABLES DESCRIPTION
LEARNER PROFILE
The learners are a mixed gender group (60% female: 40% male) of twenty-one Japanese students
aged eighteen to nineteen years. The students are in the first semester of their first year as
undergraduates on an English major degree programme. All students have Business Administration or
Commerce as their minor.

The ECA course was formerly stretched over a two-semester format. This will be the first academic
year in which a one-semester format will be used. No prior knowledge of computers is expected for
the course, however, increasingly students enter university with some experience of Microsoft Office
applications (Word, PowerPoint and Internet) in Japanese. A small group of students are usually familiar
with writing or mounting their own homepages. It is still possible for some students to have had no
prior knowledge of using computers in a classroom environment.

In relation to English language competence, the group is largely homogenous in terms of learners’
abilities in receptive and productive skills. Students’ listening and reading skills are more advanced
than writing and their speaking ability falls into the ‘false beginner’ category. On average students have
had five years of High School English, based on a grammar-translation syllabus with very little or no
speaking or conversational practice. The average TOEIC score of the group is around 420 points, with
lower scores being awarded for sections V and VI.
TEACHING AND LEARNING
ASSUMPTIONS The CBL resources are designed for use in self-study time. In this fashion computers are used as a
display tool within this context. Individual, pair and small group work (groups of four students) is
encouraged in order to develop the potential of the learning resources. The teacher is expected to act
as a facilitator, both to supervise from outside the group and to be available for individual consultation
when required in the SAC or during office hours.
PROGRAM AND LEARNER
FOCUS The main aim of the web-based materials is to present students with a stimulating learning
environment, that they can access outside of class to consolidate their in-class learning.
LANGUAGE DIFFICULTY
The language adopted by the CBL materials has been written so as to enable all students to use it
without encountering problems. Instructions are presented clearly in an easy-to-read format.
PROGRAM DIFFICULTY
The CBL materials should present no inherent difficulties to the students. The sequence through the
materials is clear and a help function is provided in case it is required.
CLASSROOM
MANAGEMENT The materials are designed to supplement one ninety-minute lesson. Instructors act in the facilitator
role but the materials are self-contained and are designed to allow them to work progressively through
them in an independent mode.

Firstly, the instructor asks students to login to the ECA course through their Blackboard account. In the
Assignments section of Bb, students open the Lesson Plan which is located there as a Word attachment.
Information for students is organised in a linear tabular format showing key words, which has proven to
be a successful way of communicating with students. This allows students to see the sequential nature
of the tasks. Hyperlinks in the Word Lesson Plan open the web-based materials.

Throughout the tasks students are required to work in small project groups. All tasks can be completed
in the Self-Access Centre or anywhere throughout the university, as students have access through their
laptops to a wireless LAN.
HARDWARE AND
PROGRAMMING The Lesson Plan is written to be used on Apple Macintosh (Operating System 9 and X) computers that
are installed in the Faculty’s five computer rooms and in the Self Access Centre. It is also compatible
with Windows PCs, eight of which are also available to students in the University library’s Global Access
LANGUAGE
Room (GAR). Students can also access Bb directly from their laptops in the university’s wireless LAN
environment. (Each first-year student is given a new Apple ibook laptop computer on enrolling in the
university. This will stay with them throughout their four-years on campus).

Fig. 4 - Main Variables used for the CBL Rationale

Lesson Plan
AIM(S) IDENTITY INFORMATION TERMINOLOGY SKILLS PRACTICE

Manipulating Kyoto city Finding out about Internet images Copying images Search Engines,
images from the a city images
Internet

Additional exercises will allow you to develop vocabulary, writing, formatting and reading skills. A brief outline of the
lesson is given below. Click on the Tasks 1-6.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 55

 TASKS INSTRUCTIONS

TASK 1 PRE-LISTENING

U Read the short passage about Kyoto and interview your partner about his/her impressions of
Japanese culture. Send your answers to your teacher.
¹ 15 minutes

TASK 2 VIDEO LISTENING

¹
Listen to the recording of the text about Japan’s former capital city, Kyoto. You may repeat the
listening once by clicking on the play button.
¹ 20 minutes

$
TASK 3 READING COMPREHENSION
Complete the cloze exercise by choosing the correct missing words.
To read the FULL TEXT click here.
¹15 minutes

TASK 4 MIX AND MATCH

ž
Match the key words from the text with their opposites.
¹15 minutes

TASK 5 POST-LISTENING

¤
Check the key vocabulary from the text that you have read.
¹ 20 minutes

!
TASK 6 SELF-DIRECTED STUDY
Write a response to the question on the course discussion board identified by the thread, Kyoto and
Japanese Culture
¹ 25 minutes

Extra Task Finished Everything? Don’t just sit there! Click on “extra task” to open the Yahoo search engine. What
can you find out about Kyoto?

FIG. 5 - LESSON PLAN

In Task 2, students watch a video of Kyoto and listen to a text being narrated about the history of this ancient Japanese
city. The video was made with a Sony camcorder and edited with Windows Movie Maker. The narrative was added later
and can be heard above the background noise of the video. Students are advised to watch and listen two times.

In Task 3, Reading Comprehension, students are asked to complete the text that they listened to in the previous
exercise. Key words have been removed and drop-down menus allow students to apply their vocabulary skills to select
the correct item. The exercise was made using the Hong Kong University Magic Cloze Maker, and adapted for the
objectives of the lesson plan. The full text can be accessed by the student to check his/her listening skills by clicking on
the link in the menu description.

In Task 4, students are given a teacher-led demonstration about how to copy images from the Internet. This is supported
by the description given in the materials, which show some of the appropriate menus from an Apple Mac OSX. Students
should demonstrate competence in this area to support the objectives of the ECA course.

In Task 5, students are asked to answer five questions by selecting the correct response from three possible answers, A,
B or C. This comprehension exercise will test students understanding of the context of the article about Kyoto. Feedback

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 56

is given at the end of the exercise in the text window below and Empirical Perspective on the Effectiveness
the questions. A score out of 100% is presented and the Question for Multimedia”. In Cameron, K.
correct answers given for each question. (Ed.1998).

Brett, P. (2000). “Integrating Multimedia into

the Business English Curriculum: a Case Study”.
In Task 6, students are requested to evaluate what they
In English for Specific Purposes, 19/3: pp. 269-
have learned about Kyoto and Japanese culture from
these series of tasks. In response, they have to produce a 290.
succinct piece of writing on the subject and post it on the
course’s group discussion board on the Blackboard forum. Chun, D. and Plass, J. (1996). Facilitating
In addition, students should illustrate their text with at least Reading Comprehension with Multimedia . In
one image that they have taken from the Internet. System 24/4, pp. 503-519.

It is sometimes the case that some of the more advanced Crookes, G. and Schmidt, R. (1991).
“Motivation: Reopening the Research Agenda”.
Language Learning, 4, pp. 469-512.
students in the group will complete all of the exercises
within the allotted time of the lesson. Clicking on “extra
task” will automatically open the Yahoo search engine. Hubbard, J. (1996). “Elements of CALL
Students are then asked to complete appropriate searches Methodology: Development, Evaluation, and
and to collect a number of images of Kyoto. The images Implementation”. In Pennington, M. (ed.), The
should be copied into a folder on their desktop and saved Power of CALL. Houston: Athelstan.
to their Bb digital drop-box.
Kennedy and McNaught (1997) “Design
Taken together the seven tasks represent an interconnected Elements for Interactive Multimedia”. In
Australian Journal of Educational Technology,
13/1: 1-22.
series of exercises to develop comprehension skills within a
broadly constructivist approach. Students are encouraged
to engage in peer reading and correction. Contributions Phillips, B. (1997). The Developer’s Handbook
to the discussion forum are checked by the teacher and to Interactive Multimedia. Routledge: Kogan
appropriate comments sent in reply to the board. Tasks are Page.
ordered in a sequential fashion and help and feedback is
provided by the teacher. Richards and Rogers (1986). Approaches to
Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Conclusion Salaberry, R. (2001). “The Use of Technology

for Second Language Learning and Teaching: A
This article has focussed on the development of an item Retrospective”. In Modern Language Journal, 85,
of CBL using an Internet-based learning environment. pp. 39-56.
Following the design process and the rationale, the most
important aspects to consider when designing the CBL Watts, N. (1997). “A Learner-based Design
materials were shown to be: Model for Interactive Multimedia Language
Learning Packages”. In System, 25/1, pp. 1-8.
- The educational objectives which guide the
design of the software

- The software tools chosen to construct the CBL

- The context for which the software is designed

to be used, and
INCENSED? EXCITED? BORED?
- Evidence of how multimedia has made a
Have you been annoyed, excited,
difference or had a specific effect on learning/

bored, frustrated or anything else by

learners

what you’ve read in this newsletter?

If so - we’d like to hear from you.
Send your letters, comments,
articles, reviews or anything else to:
References
Brett, P. (1995) Multimedia for Listening
[email protected]
Comprehension: the Design of a Multimedia-
based Resource for Developing Listening Skills .
In System 23/1, pp.77-85.

Brett, P. (1998) “An Intuitive, Theoretical

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 57

Language Teaching and Corpus Linguistics
CORPUS LINGUISTICS...

Language Teaching & Corpus Linguistics

Christian Champendal, France

Christian is an English teacher at Esinsa (School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering) in Sophia Antipolis. Research
and development at Lilla (linguistic engineering lab, Prof.H. Zingle), Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines Nice
university (UNSA). He can be contacted at: [email protected]

1. Corpus Constitution

ICASSP’98 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (12-15 May 1998, Seattle USA):
the initial 959 articles on a CD-Rom in format .pdf, the annals of this conference on Digital Signal Processing. 158
scanned texts were discarded because of their low quality. Since many articles are multinational collaborations,
language quality was the other criterion: the selected texts come from Anglo-Saxon countries, or where English is an
oficial language, with at least one participating native English speaker. Final selection was made after native speaker
veriication. The corpus is made up of 135 articles, 3 to 4 pages long; this represents 500 pages, 3900 paragraphs,
16 500 lines and 350000 occurrences of « words », 2 million characters and a size of 3,27 Moctets. An exemplar or
analogue corpus of articles on Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is thus constituted and the extraction of basic lexical
1
statistics with Z-text฀ can begin.

Application:

DSP and electronics corpora were constitued with fellow teachers, as part of English for Speciic Purposes (ESP)
Research & Development projects; but this stage is already applicable in the classroom: students can be asked to select
the texts using the criterion already speciied and extract the basic lexical statistics.

2. Occurrences

Occurrence lists of simple words (« occurrences ») show several hundred clusters of semantically and etymologically
linked elements. Our DSP corpus is thus deined quantitatively and qualitatively by 1000 “families”, called lexical sets
(LS), the nature and statistical distribution of which is deined by the domain.

Table 1. Single word occurrences

Application:

Deining the principal lexical sets in a corpus is already a classroom activity. The task catalyses many etymological
and lexicological considerations: structure and statistics of the sets themselves (table 2 below); aspects which are
usually left out of ESP/ESL language learning activities .

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 58

 Table 2. Lexical Set (occurrences / nb of different constitutive elements)

3. Collocations

Alphabetical lists of collocations allow early detection of word compounding in a corpus. This detection is optimized by
the study of associated words iles. Each unit in a collocation is listed without considering its order, as an unoriented
group; this will prove useful for lexical correspondences (N2N1 / N1 of N2) and the processing of any discontinuities,
whatever the distance and number of insertions. These lists of compounds are organized according to the lexical sets
they belong to and will complete the already existing lists of single units.

Table 3. Collocations and associated forms (*: noise)

In my work on the lexical set [use] (Champendal, 04), the study of collocation iles allows detection of recurring
structures: make use of N; use of N2; user N1; using C1… Occurrence frequency is a simple and reliable indication of
compounding. Moreover, the automatic detection of a part of a predication allows predicative relations of units within
the same lexical set to be studied.

Table 4. Processed collocations

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 59

Application: glossaries and dictionaries

At this point, glossaries for speciic purposes (DSP,

electronics…) can be constituted in class. Students
compiled a French-English glossary in electronics as
follows. From an initial 100-page corpus of electronic
components speciications in English, the occurrence lists
of simple words and collocations were extracted. The irst
list not only supplies the simple lexical units (lexemes)
for the dictionary, but also enables detection of the main
lexical sets in the corpus, organizing it for further activities.
Collocation iles permit complex lexical units (phrasemes
or compounds) to be selected. French equivalent terms
were then inserted by the students, with frequent textual
veriication.

For learners this organized extraction of results graphically

underlines the various relations or semantic links operating
within the same type of structure (with N2N1 for exemple:
user detection = detection of/detecting a user, user
perception = user perceives, user error = user’s error).

Noise (segments which do not constitue lexical units) is

usable too, in miscellaneous teaching activities such as
sorting or parsing.

Automatic alignment of compounds extracted directly from Table 5 - Concordance of verb / noun Use
lists of collocations (user error = erreur d’utilisation/eur),
is another possibility which has not yet been tested in the
classroom but which has already been investigated in our Extended Clausal Formula
lab (Kraif: 2001)

4 . Concordances

Lexical sets are networks constituted around a limited

number of predicative relations. This is easily veriied in
the concordances iles of a given lexical set.

NOTE — Verification of concordances can be restricted

to base verbal and nominal predicates or extended to all
units in a family.

Such lists of sentences make possible the derivation of

an extended clausal formula (ECF) for any predicate,
based on recurring syntactic patterns which include
typical arguments et circumstancials. This creates a basis Application:
for semantic intuition, to predict the nature and function
of elements liable to appear in proximity to a particular Concordance iles of a corpus, which are multi-
predicicative unit. The formula will obviously facilitate indexable sentence databases, become rich sources for
further automatic applications. grammatical or lexical, context-based activites: closure
tests, Multiple Choice Questionnaires, parsing (detection
and classiication of “necessary” vs “optional” elements
NOTE — Mel’Čuk’s régime (Mel’Čuk 95:119) only of a predication for example). More generally, working on
describes argumental structure, leaving out all non- lexical sets helps learners organize their vocabulary. For
actancial elements. each lexical unit, a minimal semantic map is gradually built
upon automatically detected syntactic patterns.

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 60

5. Context H. Zingle (TdL99b :281) points out that the stochastic
extraction of complex units unexpectedly produces better
This stage is mainly exploratory, and has not yet been results than extraction based on generally complicated
classroom tested. Linking together or latticing information linguistic rules. The statistical level is already lexically
retrieved through the study of a suficient number of LS; organized, and it is possible to use this natural organisation
correlating syntactico-semantic elements contained in the of language in teaching/classroom practice.
various ECF (themselves obtained from lists) are obvious
possibilities. Such information being naturally reusable for
text navigation. 7. Bibliography

CHAMPENDAL C., 2004 Analyse d’un

Formating various textual units (sentence, period, corpus d’articles en Traitement Numerique
paragraph, chapter, text) and describing their semantical du Signal en vue de modelisation linguistique
content, whilst considering reference and context is the et d’application TIC ; Thèse de Sciences du
ultimate objective. langage, directeur: Henri Zingle.

CULIOLI A., 1999 Pour une linguistique de

Creating domain-sensitive databases through organised l’enonciation 1,2 &3 Ophrys, Gap.

CRUSE D. A., 1989 Lexical Semantics.

series would be a more direct application (data is

Cambridge textboooks in linguistics.

reusable from one domain to another, and adaptable

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

when required). Ultimately, correlating lexical sets would
lead to the semantic representation of increasingly large
textual units. KRAIF Olivier, 2001, Constitution
et exploitation de bi-textes pour
l’aide à la traduction. LILLA,
Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis.
3.2.3. Training data is generated from the speech

MEL’ČUK Igor A., CLAS A., POLGUÈRE A.,

database using the analysis section of the vocoder.

1995 Introduction à la lexicologie explicative

This is the most complicated neural network in

et combinatoire; Ed Duculot.
the text-to-speech system, containing over 8000
inputs. 3.2.3 Vocoder The phonetic neural network
is not trained to generate speech directly. Instead, TRIBBLE C. 2000, Practical uses for
it is trained to produce a sequence of acoustic language corpora in ELT in A Special Interest
descriptions of ten-millisecond frames of speech. in Computers, P. Brett and G. Motteram Eds,
These are then synthesized using a vocoder. IATEFL.

T.A.L Volume 42, n°3 Lexiques semantiques,

Since the neural network is not well suited to

2001.
selecting entries from a codebook, a parametric
vocoder was used. A mixed-mode vocoder, with
TdL99a Travaux du LILLA, 1999 Henri
Zingle Numero special– La modelisation des
excitation divided into a low-frequency voiced

langues naturelles – Aspects theoriques et

band and a high-frequency unvoiced band, was
used. pratiques.
TdL99b Travaux du LILLA ; JILA’99 ; Nice
24-25 juin 1999.
6. Conclusion
ZINGLE H, 1998 ZTEXT : un outil pour
l’analyse de corpus in Travaux du LILLA
n°3, pp 69-78.
The results presented are based on practical experience
in dealing with scientiic and technical English corpora:
dentistry, electronics and digital signal processing.
However, the method is easily applied to general English
(Footnotes)
and can be modiied for all class levels. It also permits a Purpose-made lexical data extraction developed by Prof. Henri
1

direct classroom application of corpus linguistics. From Zingle who heads the Laboratoire d’Ingénierie Linguistique et de
statistics, learners move towards « cognitive semantics». Linguistique Appliquée (LILLA U.F.R Lettres et Sciences humaines /
Université Nice Sophia Antipolis).

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 61

 profession, and this is particularly true of the Internet.
MAKING IT WORK FOR YOU- A BEGINNER’S GUIDE...

Making IT Work For You

This article attempts to put a little perspective on just
exactly what is involved in using the Internet in class,
and to provide some rudimentary hints and tips for the
Gavin Dudeney, Spain
interested (but uninitiated) teacher who is thinking about
making his/her first foray into the online teaching world.
Gavin Dudeney is Project Director for the online training
and development consultancy The Consultants-
E ( www.theconsultants-e.com ). In his spare time
he is Coordinator & Newsletter Editor for the IATEFL
Computer SIG, and webmaster for the IATEFL TTEdSIG
and Associates Group. He can be contacted at gavin.du
[email protected]

T
o the great majority of us it probably seems like
aeons ago since we took our first faltering steps
in the classroom but, like me, I’m sure you can
remember quite clearly just how it felt suddenly to be in
charge of the learning processes of a group of students and
also a supposed fount of knowledge on the vagaries of the
English language. Those were heady days indeed: hours
taken to plan 15 minutes of teaching, the nervousness, the
feeling of expectation which at times it seemed impossible
to live up to. And yet we all survived and have since gone
on to be proficient, personable and professional teachers
– in short, we learned our trade and, at the same time,
learned to enjoy doing it.
PLANNING
Yet just when it appeared that we had everything under The first thing, of course, is to plan your session well: visit
control, we were suddenly presented with a new terror: the websites you intend to use and make sure you know
technology. I well remember in the mid-nineties, amidst your way around them properly. Try to use sites which
an onslaught of multimedia and blended learning centres appear to have a potentially long ‘shelf life’ – ones made
(nearly all of which have since failed), the knee-jerk by large institutions, commercial organisations, etc., rather
reaction in the more traditional schools was to fill a room than personal homepages, which have a tendency to
with computers and hope that this would staunch the come and go with alarming frequency. Make a note of the
unending flow of students out of the front door, most of particular pages you want your learners to work on, and
them attracted by the bright lights and brighter premises make sure you’re familiar with the content – your ability to
of these modern wonders. Indeed, I was one of the answer questions as they arise will add to your confidence
unfortunates who was given one of these new ‘computer and also inspire confidence in your learners.
study centres’ to run.
Planning a web-based class is not intrinsically different to
Now I’m an unusual commodity in the ELT world – I’m planning a more traditional one. I like to divide a typical Net
equally interested in computers and teaching English – and session into three parts:
since that fateful day I have made this mix my profession.
But what of the thousand of teachers who don’t share my a) Preparation
passion? Well, the answer to that question is that some of b) Online
them spent their own time and money on getting training c) Offline
and getting to grips with technology, but the vast majority
simply kept their heads down, carried on doing what they The Preparation part of the class should be treated as
had always been doing and spent a lot of their time simply normal, with introductory activities, warmers, etc. – the
wishing the computers would go away. kind of thing we all do as a matter of course. Prepare your
learners for what they are going to be doing in the Online
And the situation has hardly improved - faced with a lack part of the class. My view is that this part of the class is
of training and commitment from their various places of best done in a more ‘traditional’ classroom where you have
work, teachers have become another strand of the IT the tools and the familiar environment to work with.
disenfranchised. Yet computers have a lot to offer our

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 62

In the Online section of the class, it’s important to only and break down the computer as barrier effect
spend as much time as you need working with the often prevalent in technology-based clases.
computers. I tend to prefer to take my learners to a
computer room for this part rather than spend the entire 5) Try to arrange the IT facility in such a way that
class in there. This has the double advantage of allowing you can easily maintain control over learner
more classes to use the room and of keeping them focused activities. An ideal layout is to have the computers
during their time there. around the outside walls of the class – allowing
you to view what is on each screen, and to help
It’s worth remembering that once you put people behind should the need arise – and a central table where
computer monitors, it’s easy for them to forget that you learners can congregate for more communicative
are there, and – more importantly – why they are there. So activities. This table will also serve as a storage
the two vital words here are: ‘time’ and ‘task’: make sure place for pens, books, dictionaries, etc. and thus
your learners have a clearly-defined task to achieve and a help keep the computers free of clutter and easy
clearly-defined timeframe in which to achieve it. to use.

Once the group has got what you intended from the These are just a few suggestions for relieving the anxiety
computers, it’s time to move them back to the classroom a lot of teachers feel when faced with the attraction of
for the Offline stage of the class. This part should deal with the web but the unpredictability of the technology. The
the tasks set for the Online part and then proceed with truth of the matter is that once you have done one or two
more familiar follow-up activities to round off the class. classes with your learners you should feel infinitely more
comfortable and more prepared to deal with anything that
might come along.
Now that certainly sounds easy and manageable for
most people – BUT, I’ve left the bad news for last: things
can (and sometimes do) go wrong. So, to round off this Resources
introductory article, here are a few considerations and
some contingency plans… The Internet & The Language Classroom,
Dudeney, G., CUP, 2000
1) Whenever you use technology (and this counts as How to Use the Internet in ELT, Teeler, D. with
much for video players, cassette machines, etc., Gray, P., Longman, 2000
as for computers) you should always have a back- The Internet, Eastment, D., Hardisty, D and
up plan in place. There might be times when the Windeatt, S., OUP, 2000
websites are down, or the computers break – or,
worse still, the electricity goes off. So be prepared.

2) Use the knowledge of other teachers and of your

learners to help you with the technical side of the
lesson. Where I work we often team teach with
less experienced teachers, taking care of the small
technical problems which occasionally arise, and
leaving them free to enjoy the technology and to
teach. Asking tech-savvy learners to assist takes
the pressure off you and also gives them some

ADV
investment in the successful outcome of the class.
ERTI
3) If it’s a lesson that involves relatively few pages, SE

RE
try saving them to your computer hard disk. From

HE
Internet Explorer, choose File… Save As… then
give the file a name and make sure the Web Page,
complete option is selected. This will save the
webpage and all its images and you’ll be able to
open the pages even if the connection goes down.
You could even go as far as to print them out…

4) Unless you are working on something specifically

individual such as an email penpal exchange it is
rarely conducive to have learners working alone on
computers. Pairs are best, but three to a computer
can also work fine – just make sure that everyone
gets a turn in the ‘driving seat’. Pairwork and small
groups will help to encourage oral communication

IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 63

 T
Who’s Who in the Computer SIG
he Computer SIG is the IATEFL Special
Interest Group for Computers in
Language Education. It produces the
CALL Review, moderates a discussion list
and organises CALL-related events in the UK
and overseas. It is entirely dependent on the
interest and enthusiasm of its members. If
you would like to know more, please visit the
IATEFL website or SIG Discussion List. If you
have any suggestions or feel that you can make
a contribution to our activities, please contact
one of the committee members below...

c COORDINATOR & DEPUTY COORDINATOR & WEBSITE EDITOR

NEWSLETTER EDITOR LIST MODERATOR
Gavin Dudeney Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou Geoff Taylor
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

EVENTS MEMBERS

Paul Hullock Tilly Harrison Gary Motteram Rodney Mantle

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

JOIN IATEFL TODAY FOR CONFERENCES, NEWSLETTERS, EVENTS AND MORE...

To: IATEFL, Darwin College, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NY, UK

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ADDRESS: ...............................................................................................................

...............................................................................................................

...............................................................................................................

I am already a member of IATEFL and enclose £12 to add membership

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Please enrol me as an individual member of IATEFL. I nominate the

Computer SIG as my free Special Interest Group and enclose £40

NOTE: Payments can be made by credit card or cheque drawn on a UK bank and
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IATEFL CALL Review | ISSN: 1026-428 October 2004 - Page 64