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 Language Learning and the Internet

Uses of the Internet

 1. Source of documents, information, raw material for didactisation

The internet has become the language teacher’s primary source of authentic documents, usually textual, but also aural, visual and multimedia. The identification of these documents involves the use of a search engine. Despite criticism of its increasing commercialisation, the world’s favourite search engine is still Google but there are many others. Some present results visually, some sort them into useful categories, some send the search out to several search engines simultaneously, others narrow the search down little by little using directories. Most have options allowing you to search specifically for video documents, audio documents, images or text.
A growing number of search engines allow you to search the "deep" or "hidden" web. These terms cover all the information on the internet that is inaccessible to the mainstream search engines eg. information contained in catalogues, timetables and other database systems. A Brightplanet study recently concluded that "The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the 1 billion of the surface Web".

First, find your document
Internet Search Activities for learners

The power of these search engines can be harnessed for language learning and teaching in various activities such as treasure hunts and grammar safaris. These activities use the internet as a giant corpus of authentic English and encourage students to use search engines to look for occurrences of given language or to find information about cultural or linguistic practices.
Factors that have to be taken into consideration in this area include : the skills necessary for using a search engine effectively, skills necessary for the evaluation of web pages, the differences in reading on screen and on paper.


For links to various guidelines and tutorials on search techniques cf. Bare Bones 101 : Tips on searching the web at http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/bones.html

A useful booklet: Web Skills for Language Learners is available at : http://www.well.ac.uk/wellproj/wellbook.htm

 Grammar safari (Linguacentre): http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/web.pages/grammarsafari.html

A Taxonomy of Web Quest tasks (Bernie Dodge)http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/taskonomy.html

and teachers......

A treasure hunt for SAPAG teachers

Evaluating web resources

 Internet Detective : http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/internet-detective.html

 For a list of links to other web evaluation sites and guidelines cf. Kathy Schrocks guide for educators: http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html

Don't forget that we read differently on-screen and off-screen

 Cf. Ganderton Roger J. New Strategies for a new medium? Observing L2 Reading on the World Wide Web (thesis): http://www.cltr.uq.edu.au/oncall/gander122.html

Cf. Harnessing CyberFrench for Specific Purposes, Brian McCarthy, University of Wollogong http://www.lerc.ritsumei.ac.jp/callej/4-3/mccarthy.html

 "As with any other store of information, the potential of the Web as a resource in language teaching is only as great as the teacher's ability to harness it and to integrate it into the overall learning program."

 "A class excursion into cyberland can be as fruitful or as catastrophic as a field trip to France with an average group of students."

You might even go as far as to create an entire corpus off the web.

Cf. Jeremy Whistle, "Concordancing with students using an "off-the Web corpus" in ReCALL 11:2 (1999) 74-80 This article reports on a study carried out with first and second year students of French at University College Northampton. Students were involved in the creation of the concordances by getting them to perform the searches and extract the raw data before proceeding to the analysis and rule-formulation stages. First they had to find or construct a corpus. They chose to base the corpus on "Label France" published by the Ministère des Affaires étrangères (232 texts, varied in subject but aimed at a foreign audience so as to avoid the "stylistic tricks that one often finds in journalism".) Copyright clearance was easily gained from the French embassy. Then two possibilities: either use the concordancer to clear up any queries about language spontaneously brought up by students in class (but are first year students grammatically aware enough to do this?) or identify grammatical points in advance and then exploit them in class. For a learner-centred approach the first should really be adopted but the need to stick to the syllabus led them to adopt the second. Students were given worksheets and guided throught the grammar points, formulating rules for themselves.

Cf. Foucou Pierre-Yves & Kübler, Natalie, A Web based Environment for Teaching Technical English, (http://wall.univ-paris13.fr) (dead link 19/10/00)

Try http://users.ox.ac.uk/~talc98/foucou.htm

 "Extraire des ressources de W3 nous a permis de constituer des corpus de textes. Nous avons pour le moment du corpus monolingue anglais et français de la langue générale et dans différentes spécialités, telles que l'informatique, le juridique, l'environnement, etc. Nous disposons aussi d'un corpus bilingue anglais-français et aligné en informatique. Notre objectif est bien sûr d'augmenter les types de spécialités traitées, mais aussi de proposer du corpus multilingue de spécialité et/ou de la langue générale. Les enseignants ont accès à des outils d'interrogation de corpus tels qu'un concordanceur utilisant des expressions régulières et les partie du discours ou des analyses statistiques, qui leur permettent de se familiariser par exmple, avec une langue de spécialité donnée. Ils peuvent aussi interroger le corpus bilingue qui leur donnera des concordances et leurs équivalents dans l'autre langue.

Potential Problems in using the Internet as a source of documents

For a comparison of two sites used by ESP practitioners see:
Cf. Labeyrie-Catroux Michèle: Analyse contrastive de la mise en ligne des magazines scientifiques français et américains : l'exemple de Sciences et Avenir et Scientific American,DEA 1999.

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