1 - Aims

When language teachers decide to exploit the potentials of Information and Communication Technology,  they have to do this by inserting this practice into a more comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework, which, in every moment and in every step of their work, can make clear the didactic reasons and the purposes of this choice.

"The Internet is a tool which has great potential in the language classroom, but its effectiveness in practice depends to a large extent on the way it is exploited by teachers and students. Your general methodology is also important." (Windeatt, Hardisty and Eastment 2000 p 8)

It has to be kept in mind that language learning is already effectively promoted with traditional materials if they are used inside well planned activities/lessons/units/modules that are designed with a precise awareness of the students’ needs, their learning paths, and the under-lying approaches.  The revolution that new media, such as multimedia computers and the Internet in particular, can bring to English teaching is that they dramatically enlarge the repertoire of educational tools, their possibilities, and their combinations. They allow teachers and learners to extend their access both to educational resources, and to resources in general that can be used as educational materials, to make everything visible and so more comprehensible, to help analyse and organise information, to get in touch with different types of media, texts, styles, and registers, so improving language understanding and producing. Finally they give to teachers and students the possibility to communicate and to promote collaboration, leading to the creation, production and publication of personalised and original work.

This is the new frontier that language teachers can explore and creatively exploit in order to offer their students the possibility to use a new language to learn and communicate; as English is the language of online communication, they not only improve their command of the language but also use the language to study subjects that they find interesting from the aspect of the content.[1]

The following points should be the final aims of introducing ICT in language teaching:

·      to build a learning environment in which teachers and learners can create contexts for real communication inside and outside   the classroom;

·      to present the English language as a means to learn and communicate about content;

·      to transform the realism of the contexts created in class simulations into reality;

·      to break school isolation;

·      to establish new relationships between school and society;

·      to establish new relationships between school and youth languages.

Computers are introduced  into language teaching as the communicative tools which can make this possible.

“I think the strongest way we can do that is by creating situations within schools where children pursue with their own passion from their hearts. They pursue projects that they're really interested in, they find out by getting the information they need from the Internet. They work with one another. They do something difficult. The teacher acts as a counsellor, as a guide. So the teacher has to get used to the idea of respecting the children as learners, of recognising that they create their own knowledge, that the old ambition that many educators have had - that children can learn by doing experientially in a way that's really meaningful for them - can finally be realised. So, this is not about what technology does to learning. It is about old well-established ideas of how we would like children to learn and technology makes possible to make these dreams of the past educators come true.” (Seymour Papert[2], Venice, 1997)

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2 - Role of computer in relation to the different  learning theories and instruction models

There is a strict interconnection between use of technologies, learning theories, and teaching models. The role of computers in teaching has changed in time, following the development of the theoretical models of the learning processes, and can be different today in accordance with the learning theory and the method/s a teacher practices. There are three principal learning theories that are relevant to the use of advanced technologies in teaching: Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism. The tables below show the characteristics of these three theories, and relate them to the models of instruction that consequently apply, and show how computers can be used.

As it is possible to see in this table, there has been a shift from the idea of teaching as transmission of a given and absolute body of pre-determined knowledge, considered as an objective corpus the learners have to acquire, to the idea of teaching as process oriented, aiming at the acquisition of skills and strategies that can make a student a lifelong learner. From behaviourism to cognitivism, and constructivism the shift comes from the centrality of the teacher to that of the students and their needs, from the centrality of the information to be transmitted to that of the processes through which learners acquire new knowledge. In a few words the focus moves from what to teach and learn to how to teach by respecting the mental paths of the learners. Constructivism, in particular,  “Rather than seeing information as a thing that can be transmitted, sees students as independent learners building and creating knowledge for themselves in a learning environment designed to encourage and facilitate just that……knowledge is always constructed by each student's efforts to make sense of the world…..instruction means providing exploratory and problem-solving situations that allow the student to experiment, to make mistakes, and to work collaboratively with peers to find answers to problems. " (Willis J W, Stephens E C & Matthew K, op cit  p. 7)

What is the role of technology in all this? It supports the choices that the teachers make at every step of their work, by providing an easily accessible environment to fulfil their teaching objectives. 

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       3 - Communication technologies in learning vs Learning through communication technologies

COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN LEARNING

When teachers decide to harness the power of modern communications technology in order to deliver the curriculum in a more “efficient” manner, without questioning the assumptions that are incorporated into the curriculum, we can say that they are merely using communications technology in teaching and learning. The only changes are in the tools used. The philosophy that underlies the system survives intact.

This is what usually happens in our schools, when the teachers decide to update means and materials to better fulfil their job by exploiting the incredible number of opportunities offered by computers, and online technology in particular.

It is "simply" technology used by teachers and learners in their way towards language improvement.

When the teachers introduce computers and ICT into their usual activities, they add some explicit values, in that they give them more effectiveness, and obtain more involvement on the part of the students because of the unlimited potentials of both hardware and software. The learning activities are optimised and quickened by the exploitation of the new technologies' capacities: immediate access to an enormous amount of  resources and information, the potential to carry out interpersonal exchanges, and to establish an authentic contact with the outside world. Beyond involvement and effectiveness, there is also another explicit value, the most important for language teachers, which is the undeniable improvement of  language skills and strategies related to handling information and the language through which it is conveyed in the stages of searching, analysing and processing information. All this is mixed together with other skills that represent another important  implicit additional value that the use of computers and ICT can give the students: the simultaneous, natural and often incidental acquisition of the IT skills, necessary to handle hardware and software in order to fulfil tasks and solve problems[8].

Here is a list of some skills and strategies involved in ICT-based language activities:

·      technology skills in the  use of hardware and software

·     navigation skills (search, discrimination, skimming, scanning, evaluation of sources, material, types of texts, style, information)

·     choice of suitable paths inside the hypertext/hypermedia in order to find the desired results

·     definition of the characteristics of the information (origin, quality, relevance, reliability)

·     use of search engines (planning the search, devising the possible key words, choosing different types of search engines according to the purpose of the search)

·     use of the information according the pre-determined objectives and tasks

·     use of the written language as a means of communication (formal / informal) in email and chat exchange

·     use of the oral language as a means of communication in videoconferencing

·     use of the oral language as a means of communication while discussing, reporting, negotiating and mediating inside the class with the teacher and the other students

LEARNING THROUGH COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

In this case we think of the new learning opportunities offered by the introduction of ICT in education, in particular:

·        Distance education and training

·        Autonomous learning

·        Cooperative learning with distant people and entities

These are the educational fields where ICT has done a sort of revolution by imprinting a big push towards unexpected developments and applications. These activities were almost impossible, or at least very difficult to carry out and limited in number,  before the introduction of IT and telematics and can be considered  the true innovations in IT applied to education.

The choice of introducing communication through IT in language teaching involves a change in the way of searching and selecting language materials, building activities, giving tasks, organizing work in class, planning projects, stating objectives, collaborating with other teachers, schools and social institutions.

It is not simply the introduction of new powerful teaching aids in the usual routine in order to allow students to obtain better results. It is a more complex process that changes the perspective of both teachers and students in the way they consider the language and what they can do with it.[9]

Teachers have to reconsider:

• role of the language
• role of the language teacher[10]
•  teaching plans/syllabus design
• teaching activities/learning tasks
• learning environment
• rapport (teacher/student, student/student, teacher/teacher)
• relationship between schools
• relationship between school and society

In conclusion it’s not only a question of "using computers". Using computers at school is not an approach at all, nor it is a new methodology, nor it is an innovation in itself, as it is possible to use new tools even inside very traditional frameworks. Technology can become a teaching aid and a teaching/learning project catalyst only if the teachers previously re-define their objectives, their idea of school and teaching, their teaching methodologies.[11]

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WHAT ARE HYPERTEXTS? WHAT ARE HYPERMEDIA?

Ted Nelson[12] wrote in 1965 his self-published Literary Machines: "By hypertext I mean non-sequential writing - text that branches and allows choices to the reader…..As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways."

Nicholas Negroponte[13] wrote in 1996: “Hypermedia is an extension of hypertext, a term for highly interconnected narrative, or linked information. The idea came from early experiments at the Stanford Research Institute by Douglas Englebart and derived its name from work at Brown University by Ted Nelson, circa 1965. In a printed book, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters follow one another in an order determined not only by the author but also by the physical and sequential construct of the book itself. While a book may be randomly accessible and your eyes may browse quite haphazardly, it is nonetheless forever fixed by the confines of three physical dimensions.

In the digital world, this is not the case. Information space is by no means limited to three dimensions. An expression of an idea or train of thought can include a multidimensional network of pointers to further elaborations or arguments, which can be invoked or ignored. The structure of the text should be imagined like a complex molecular model. Chunks of information can be reordered, sentences expanded, and words given definitions on the spot…... These linkages can be embedded either by the author at "publishing" time or later by readers over time. Interaction is implicit in all multimedia.”  (Nicholas Negroponte 1995, Cyberdock version of Being Digital,  http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/)

BUILDING HYPERTEXTS AT SCHOOL

Making a hypertext as a class project means to affect all of the three main components of the teaching-learning process, cognitive, metacognitive, affective, because it is a complex work, made up of different phases and activities which improve language, cognitive, and  metacognitive skills, give the students a greater degree of autonomy, present the foreign language as a communicative tool, enhance the motivation of the students, foster their capacity of cooperating.

The main purpose of the project is related explicitly to the improvement of the students' knowledge of a content
by means of a comprehensive exploration of the topics chosen by the class through the search, the
analysis and the comparison of materials coming from different sources (books, encyclopaedias, WWW,
CDROMs, etc.).

The second, and not less important, purpose is related to the development of all the different skills and competencies necessary for the production of the final work, the hypertext/hypermedia, which is assumed to be the "physical" representation of the collaborative work of both the individuals (students and teacher) and the groups involved in the project. 

In particular a project work aiming at the production of a hypertext develops:

·        knowledge of both content and language

·        cognitive skills, both linguistic and logic

·        metacognitive awareness

·         IT skills

·        learner’s autonomy

·        affective component

Finally it changes completely the role of the teacher (no more "transmitter, but coordinator, mediator, activator, etc.). The teacher is one of the group, sometimes learner of his/her students.

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

Content

·     acquisition of plenty of new information about the topics chosen

·     choice of some aspects of the content matter  according their relevance and/or the students’ interest

·     establishment of all the possible relations between the information collected

Language and logic skills

·      reinforcement of linguistic competence and development of personal vocabulary

·      enhancement of skimming, scanning, discriminating (reading)

·      development of classroom language/conversational/social English (listening/speaking) during the group or class
discussions/reports, etc

·      improvement of the capacity of taking notes while reading or while listening/viewing

·      discriminating and comparing information and sources

·      mind mapping

·     production of summaries (writing) or oral reports (speaking) to be presented to the group or to the class

·      improvement of the capacity of producing personal schemes, layouts, graphic representations which
synthetically illustrate the main ideas and the information found and that are the bases of the
personal production of the texts

·     reorganising materials in nodes[14], establishing links between them, after deciding the type of logical relation between the information collected

Affective component

·     development of the capacity of negotiating and mediating in order to decide what to do (mind
mapping, page planning, project time schedule, individual or group tasks, deadlines, etc.)

·     development of personal/group responsibilities in carrying out a common work

·     development of a sense of self-confidence and self-esteem in doing a work which has a precise and concrete purpose, that is the realisation of a common final communicative product

·     acquisition of the awareness that English is a means for acquiring or reporting information, that is to say a language for learning, a vehicle for communicating

·     development of a cooperative work: student-student, student-teacher, teacher-teacher, school-external reality, in the research phase, in the production stage, and in the stage of the final presentation of the product

Metacognitive awareness

·     acquisition of metacognitive awareness through the analysis of one’s own method effectiveness

·     awareness of what is being done and its purpose

·     development of one's own autonomy and self-managing in planning the work, searching for sources, analysing
comparing , and choosing them

IT skills

·     acquisition of the basic technical skills in using the necessary hardware and software (knowledge of the necessary functions of the operating system for creating and handling folders and files, use of a word processor, graphic and sound acquisition/processing software, a hypertext/web page authoring software)

·     mastery of the use of the browser and the search engines while navigating through the Internet

·     use of email and chat for getting in touch with people and entities outside the school

LINGUISTIC AND TECHNICAL PRE-REQUISITES

The students should have an adequate linguistic competence that allows them to read and comprehend the
texts, report their content both orally and in written form.

It is assumed that students are already able to skim and scan a text, find the relevant information and
organise coherent and cohesive oral/written production.

As to the content, it would be better that the students have already some general knowledge of the content, so that they can easily skim through the materials they find and discriminate what is useful to them and what is not. The production of the hypertext is intended as a way to deepen the knowledge of the aspects they like most.

From the technical point of view, the students should be able to use the main commands of the operating system
and the main functions of an authoring software for creating hypertexts, better if in HTML language so that the product can be published on the Web . In addition they should be familiar with the Internet navigation. Anyway every project may be carried out in collaboration with a teacher who is competent in Information Technology, and the student can acquire the necessary skills in technology while working, as often happens in real life.

A MAJOR POINT: USING AUTHENTIC MATERIAL

One of the major aspects of carrying out a project like this is the continuous and massive exposure of the learners to authentic language, and consequently the use of linguistic material which is not graded or adapted to the students’ levels because it is not intentionally devised for learning purposes. The advantages of this decision can easily be seen in that the learners are immediately in touch with real language, both oral and written, without any contrived mediation in terms of lexical range, structures, complexity and variety of texts. The disadvantages are in the possible students’ linguistic inadequacy in managing such materials. The key is in the perspective from which we face the problem, which is not in grading and adapting the material to the level of linguistic proficiency of the students, which would result in excessive simplification both of the language and inevitably of the content. The right perspective is in grading and adapting the tasks and the activities through which the content is presented, comprehended, manipulated, processed. The content and the tasks, not the language, must be at the level of the students, but never too simple; otherwise there will be no new learning and the material will appear too banal and not motivating in the eyes of the students, only an elementary repetition of what is already known, not challenging or intriguing from the cultural and cognitive point of views.

METHODOLOGY

In the different phases of the project different types of procedures are used:

·        plenary sessions\discussions

·        individual work

·        group work

·        individual and group research in class

·        autonomous work

MAIN STEPS IN DEVELOPING A HYPERTEXT

·     choice of the topic with the class and other teacher/s if it is an interdisciplinary work

·     construction of a mind map which helps generate ideas for associations and helps organise information

·      search /discussion/process/creation of materials/documents related to the aspects chosen (individually or in groups)

·     plan of each page/node to be created and production of the texts, choice and processing of the images, sounds, animations etc. to put in them

·     location of all the possible links that represent the interconnections among the pages/nodes produced

·      work at the computer individually or in small groups for making files and building up the hypertext, by using different types of software (word processor, graphics software, hypertext authoring, etc.).

·     presentation of the final product

TESTING AND ASSESSMENT

Testing and assessment will have the double purpose of measuring both the level of language learning and the mastery of the content.

At the end of the analysis of the materials taken from the different sources, the groups will report orally about the information and the sources they have found . The purpose will be the assessment of the oral production, the quantity/quality of the content, and, consequently, the suitability and effectiveness of the materials collected.

At the end of the phase concerning the production of the texts, the students will be assessed in their capacity of summarising, re-elaborating and making coherent and linguistically correct written texts.

At the end of the project the groups will present the final product in public and the students will be assessed according to a list of parameters and descriptors of level specifically devised for the type of communication chosen, the hypertext, so not only related to the individual linguistic competence. Some of the parameters could be graphic interface, navigability, logic organisation, presentation skills, etc.

The capacity to co-operate in order to fulfil a common objective will be assessed by observing the communicative interaction among the students and between students and teachers. A form will be used on which the teacher will take systematic notes on the behaviour of the students (especially during group work) and on the results of the autonomous work, on the respect of the deadlines and task fulfilment.

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5 - Interpersonal exchange projects by using email

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