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ABSTRACT
In this article it is informed about the basic skillset needed for effective use of the Internet with students and take a
closer look at the process for introducing the Internet into teaching foreign languages, find evaluated and decided on
a collection of web pages which teachers want to use as part of teaching.
KEYWORDS
Printed pages, Internet connection, computer lab, ELT websites, authentic sites, Search engines;
INTRODUCTION
Using websites is one of the easiest and least stressful
ways of getting started with technology in the
classroom. There is a large and constantly expanding
collection of resources on the web, at a variety of levels
and covering an amazing array of topics. You can
choose from authentic (written for Internet surfers in
general) sources or ELT-specific sites (made by, and
for, teachers), monolingual or multilingual sites, sites
with multimedia, or just simple text, for those on
slower connections.
Research Article
USING WEBSITES IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Submission Date:
November 05, 2022,
Accepted Date:
November 15, 2022,
Published Date:
November 22, 2022
Crossref doi:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume02Issue11-09
Abdullaeva Shakhlo Sayfievna
The Teacher Of Foreign Languages Department Karshi Engineering Economic Institute, Uzbekistan
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
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The web is a source of content which can be used as a
window on the wider world outside your class, and is -
of course - a readily available set of authentic material.
As such, it is a much larger repository of content than
would previously have been readily available to you
and your students.
Perhaps one of the best tips we can give you at this
point is to work as a team with other teachers in your
centre. Everydiv has their favourite websites, and
plenty of teachers will, at some point, have used
websites in class, or taken material from the web and
adapted it for teaching purposes. Take the time to
share sources of content with other teachers and
organize regular get-togethers where you sit down and
discuss what you have found on the Internet and how
you have used it in class. Collaboration like this can help
to reduce the time you spend searching for good
materials and the time spent preparing activities or
making worksheets. Just as the Internet is becoming
more of a collaborative medium, so should your use of
it in your teaching.
The technology needed to use the Internet for
teaching is relatively limited and the chances of
something going wrong are greatly reduced over more
complex technology approaches such as attempting to
carry out live chat or video-conferencing sessions.
Another advantage of this tool is that you don't
necessarily have to rely on a constant Internet
connection if you bear in mind that it is possible to save
local copies of websites on your computer, or print out
potentially useful pages for later use. Indeed, you can
use web pages in the classroom in a variety of ways:
as printed pages, with no computers. Although
printing is not necessarily the cheapest option, it is
certainly a viable one in places where there may be
limited access to the Internet. Indeed, a lot of activities
using web pages will only necessitate the printing of
one or two pages, which can subsequently be
photocopied.
with one computer with an Internet
connection. This can be enhanced by connecting the
computer to a data projector or even an interactive
whiteboard, allowing for greater visibility in class, but
it is also possible to make use of a single computer on
its own connected to the Internet for reference.
in a computer lab with a set of networked and
connected computers. If you're lucky enough to be in
this kind of situation, then you are ideally placed to
incorporate Internet content into your regular
teaching.
It's important that both you and your learners see the
use of the Internet as an intrinsic part of the learning
process, rather than as an occasional activity which has
nothing to do with their regular study programme. We
would therefore recommend that, if you plan to use
the Internet, you should talk to your learners and
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explore the reasons for using this resource with them.
This can be done at lower levels in their own language
or in English with higher-level classes. You will need to
talk to your learners about why Internet content may
be useful to them and discuss their attitudes to
technology in general- when they use computers, and
what for. Show them how the course book and other
materials can be enhanced by extra material from the
Internet, but above all, make it clear that this is not a
toy, not something that you are just using to fill in the
time.
With some learners there may be some resistance to
regular computer use in, the classroom. We have often
found, for example, that professional people view
computers as work tools rather than as resources for
learning. It is vital that they appreciate that this is a
useful, as well as an entertaining, tool in the classroom
and that it can contribute to their language
development in a variety of ways, for example by
giving them the opportunity to build vocabulary or
improve their listening skills. Lower-level classes can be
engaged with visual and multimedia materials, the use
of songs and other video materials.
ELT websites or authentic websites? Your choice of
website will depend largely on what you want to
achieve with it. Many teachers tend to steer clear of
authentic websites, and by this we mean any site not
created with the language learner in mind, believing
that their students will find them too difficult. But, as
with all authentic materials, the level and language
challenges posed by these sites can be largely
mitigated by the type of task you expect your learners
to carry out.
A well-designed task will allow your learners to deal
with authentic sites, guiding them through not only the
text, but also the layout and navigation problems that
may otherwise impact on their learning experience.
It is also the case that many learners these days are far
more used to working with computer-based text and
information than they are to dealing with more
traditional, paper-based forms of text and this
familiarity with the conventions of web design can
count in your favour when deciding to use authentic
content from the Internet.
Authentic sites, on the other hand, can be chosen to fit
your learners' interests. This is a key factor in keeping
motivation high in your electronic classroom. When
evaluating authentic sites for possible incorporation
into your teaching, try to find ones which have an easy
structure and navigation, and with smaller chunks of
text per page. These will be more approach able and
understandable. Design your tasks to make them
achievable, and show your learners how they can use
online dictionary sites to help them- if they need them.
Authentic sites also provide an ideal opportunity to
work through the issues of ‘total comprehension' that
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plenty of learners have to deal with at some point in
their studies.
How to find useful websites? As already mentioned,
the Internet is a vast repository of information and
resources, and it is perhaps exactly this range that
makes it seem, at first, daunting and unapproachable
to most teachers. In the next two sections we take a
look at how to find and evaluate resources for use in
class.
The ability to search through Internet content, and
quickly and efficiently find suitable resources is
perhaps the most underrated, and yet most useful, skill
that both teachers and learners can acquire.
For teachers, having good search skills means finding
useful resources quickly, speeding up lesson planning
and facilitating web use in class. For learners, it means
being able to quickly accomplish web-based tasks, thus
ensuring that the technology enhances the learning
experience rather than impeding it. It makes sense,
then, both to acquire these skills, and to spend some
time sharing them with your learners.
There are three basic ways of searching on the
Internet, and we will briefly describe them below, and
look at ways of making searches more targeted and
efficient.
Search engines. Although there is a large variety of
search engines, perhaps the most well-known is
Google (www.google.com),which currently indexes
over twelve billion web pages.
A search engine is almost directly analogous to a
telephone directory, or any other database of stored
information. You search for a name or a title, and the
directory gives you more information about that entry.
But with over twelve billion pages to choose from, it's
not quite as easy to use as a phone directory. So how
do you find exactly what you want?
The answer comes in knowing what kind of
information Google actually has on each web page that
it indexes. What Google knows about a page is
generally the page address on the web, the page title,
when it was last updated and a few key words
associated with the content itself. These key words are
defined by the designer of the page, and can
reasonably be expected to accurately reflect the
content of the page. The key to good searching in
Google is to define your key words properly.
The other technique which you may find useful is to use
the 'phrase' search technique which involves wrapping
part of a phrase in inverted commas, thus ensuring that
Google will treat the words not as individual entities,
but will actually look for sentences on web pages
which contain those words in that particular order.
Thus, instead of searching for cheap hotel in Rome,
which can search for any or all of these words, in any
position and order, on a page, try searching for "cheap
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hotel in Rome" as part of a phrase you might expect to
find on a web page.
The ultimate trick with Google is to try to imagine the
web page you are looking for, and then try to visualize
the content that is on this ideal page. This technique
will help you decide on exactly what to search for.
Real language searches. A real language search such as
Ask (www.ask.com) allows the user to type simple
questions as search queries. Thus our learner who is
investigating the life and times of Shakira types
something along the lines of “When was Shakira
born?” instead of a selection of appropriate key words.
Note that the website does not actually analyse or
indeed understand the question itself but rather
selects the keywords from the query and constructs a
search based on them.
A search on Ask should give you a results page with the
answer to your question at the top (where Ask has
been able to find a direct answer), and links to relevant
sites below that.
Your choice of search facility will depend on how you
like to work, and which site you find particularly
attractive and useful. However, it is worth taking the
time to play with all three and to spend some time
exploring them with your learners. Learners can
benefit from an exposure to all three types, as they
activate different linguistic and mental processes.
Keywords are good for exploring word relationships
and lexical areas. Subject searches help define and
refine ideas and contexts. A real search can provide
useful practice in question formation.
A simple way of introducing the topic of searching the
Internet in class is to produce a trivia quiz or short
'treasure hunt' type activity for your learners to do.
Give them a set of questions and allow them to use all
three search pages to find the answers. Make it into a
timed quiz, with the first team to finish bringing the
activity to an end. Then go over the answers and help
them to see how to improve their search skills.
It is at this point that you can examine which search
page was used in each case, if it was the appropriate
choice, and work together as a group to extrapolate
general conclusions about search techniques.
Sample treasure hunt. Use your search skills to find this
Information:
•
The name of the president of the World Bank.
•
The capital of Scotland.
•
The country that won the 1986 FIFA World Cup.
•
T
he author of “Of Mice and Men”.
•
N
ationality of the architect of “La Pedrera”.
•
The director of the movie, North by Northwest.
In this example we can see how a variety of approaches
would be possible- and how these might lead to a
useful discussion on search skills, as well as some basic
language work, on question formation, for example.
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The first search encourages the use of Google and the
'part of a sentence' approach discussed above, with
perhaps the best search term being" ls the president of
the World Bank", while the second one might work
nicely as a real language search, with learners coming
up with the question “What's the capital of Scotland?”
The third search involves reformulation to be
successful, perhaps “Who won the 1986 FIFA World
Cup?” These are the skills which are the basis of many
of the activities you will do on the Internet, so it is
worth spending sometime refining them and
examining them a little more closely.
It is also worth considering specialist sites as a source
of information. Teach yourself and your learners to
think a little more laterally. For example, any queries
related to movies might be better directed to the
Internet Movie Database (wwwimdb.com) than a
search engine. Similarly, book information can be easily
found on the Amazon site (www.amazon. com), and
football World Cup information on the FIFA site
(www.fifa.com).
Variations on this treasure hunt activity include
learners then making a quiz for another team to do.
They must be able to find the answers themselves
before they hand over the task to the other team. Or
the whole class could make a quiz for you, the teacher,
to do as homework! This can be a highly motivating
task for learners, as they pit themselves and their
Internet skills against the teacher's.
There are also subject-or media-specific search sites
which are worth having a quick look at, though do bear
in mind that much of what you find on media search
sites will be subject to copyright, so please check the
terms of use before including anything in any materials
you might make. You might like to try the following to
get started:
•
http://images.google.com/- Google image search,
allows you to search an enormous collection of
images in various formats. A good place to start
looking for illustrations for worksheets, teaching
materials, projects or presentations.
•
http://froogle.google.com/ - Google shopping
search, gives you access to comparative shopping
results for products. Use this to find products you
are interested in, read reviews and find the best
prices.
•
http://video.search.yahoo.com/ - Yahoo! video
search allows you to search a large database of
online video material by keyword or category. Ideal
if you want to demonstrate something in a more
lively way, for music videos and other multimedia
classes.
You may also like to try one of the Meta search sites.
These are sites which search more than one search
engine at the same time, giving you, for example, the
ability to search Yahoo!, Google and Ask from one
single page. Examples include:
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http://www.dogpile.com/ - Dogpile.
http://www.kartoo.com/ - KartOO.
http://www.mamma.com/ - Mamma.
You will, of course, get far more results than if you
simply used one single search engine, but you will also
get a sense of balance from a meta search engine, as
the results come from a variety of sources using a
variety of search techniques. You will tend to get a
more rounded view of what is out there on the
Internet. Concentrating on the first couple of pages of
results will help reduce the potentially overwhelming
quantity of data returned.
How to evaluate websites? Having found potentially
useful websites, the next step is to evaluate how useful
and appropriate they are for the classroom. You will
also need to think about the aims and objectives of
your lesson. Does the website you have found fit in
with these, and does it enhance and complement the
other materials and activities you have planned for the
class? Sometimes the Internet content will be the core
of a particular lesson but at other times it will merely
serve as a jumping-off point into something more
closely related to a particular course book theme or
unit, or be a source of extra material to follow up on
the core classroom content. There are various standard
criteria for judging websites which can serve as a
starting point for your evaluation:
1 Accuracy:
Who wrote the page? Is this person an expert
in the subject matter? Check qualifications, experience
-
look for an “about me” link.
Is the page content reliable and factually
correct? Cross-reference with other similar websites
and encyclopedias.
2 Currency:
Is the content up-to-date? Check factual
information against other reliable sources.
When was the page last updated? Check for
information at the bottom / top of the page.
3 Content:
Is the site interesting and stimulating? Consider
the content from your learners' point of view.
Is it attractive and easy to navigate? Check the
colour combinations, the logic of the links and visual
structure.
4 Functionality:
Does the site work well? Are there any broken
links? Be sure to check all pages, and follow all links to
all pages you intend to use.
It may well be that the accuracy and currency criteria,
both essentially factual, are not of interest to you if you
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are working on a purely linguistic level that is planning
a class that exploits the language of the site, rather
than the content itself. On the other hand, accuracy
and currency might be the most important criteria if
learners are taking notes and interpreting information
in preparation for producing a project.
As far as content is concerned, note that criteria such
as ease-of-use and interest are taken into account, but
you may also want to consider adding a further set of
criteria here along the lines of appropriateness. In this
subcategory you would note which groups or levels the
site would be suitable for and any problems you
foresee with the site itself.
Functionality will be a category with consequences for
all teachers. Not only can it be very frustrating to follow
through the content of a site to be met with broken
links and missing information, but it can be equally
frustrating to wait twenty minutes for a short video to
download due to the speed of your connection. Again,
careful preparation and investigation in the lesson
planning stage can go a long way towards making the
learners' experience enjoyable and trouble-free.
However, you evaluate the usefulness of the websites
you find, make sure that you keep a record of the
content and address so that you begin to build up a
large stock of evaluated sites.
Web teaching dos and don'ts. Planning carefully and
adopting a structured approach to the way you use
websites in the classroom should give you the
confidence to try out different ways of introducing
your learners to Internet content.
Most of the time you will be using websites to provide
your learners with knowledge and content which they
perhaps do not know or would normally not have
access to, or to supplement more traditional course
materials. This can be highly motivating for them,
leading to more language production and a higher
stake in the success of the class.
It is worth bearing in mind that it is not necessarily the
'all-singing, all-dancing' websites
–
ones with a lot of
animation, video, audio or other multimedia content-
which will be of most interest or use in your
classrooms. Don't discount simple text-based websites
which might be very beneficial in your own context.
Apart from anything else, they are less likely to
malfunction or cause problems when you go to use
them.
However, having said all this, things can and
sometimes do go wrong. To round off this article, here
are a few considerations and some contingency plans:
Whenever you use technology you should
always have a backup plan in place. There might be
times when the websites are down, or the computers
crash or, worse still, the electricity goes off. So be
prepared.
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Use the knowledge of other teachers and of
your learners to help you with the technical side of the
lesson. 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 investment in the successful outcome
of the class.
If it's a lesson that involves relatively few web
pages, try saving them to your computer hard disk.
From 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 web
page and all its images and you'll be able to open the
page seven if the connection goes down. You could
even go so far as to print them out.
Bearing in mind all these suggestions
–
and taking into
account the successful combination of these
searching, evaluating and planning skills- you should
now be in a position to fully explore the web with your
learners.
In summary, consider the difference between EFL-
related and authentic websites, look at how to find
websites using different types of search engine,
consider how to evaluate a website for classroom use,
look at lesson planning using Internet resources, at
both higher and lower levels and provide a list of
Internet teaching dos and don'ts.
REFERENCES
1.
Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly How to teach
English with technology? Pearson Education
Limited 2007pp. 160-172
2.
Brown, H. Douglas. 1994. Teaching by Principles:
An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
3.
Celce-Murcia, M., and S. Hilles. Techniques and
Resources in Teaching Grammar. New York: Oxford
University Press. 1988, pp 76-96
4.
Widdowson,
H.
Teaching
language
as
communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1978. pp.126-132
5.
Roy, A. (2019). Technology in Teaching and
Learning. International Journal of Innovation
Education and Research, 7, 414-422.
6.
Dudeny, G. and Hocky, N. (2008). How to Teach
English with Technology. London: Longman.
