Chapter 2

The teaching methodology framework: Integrating Internet resources in EFL[1] classes

2.1 – ICT in education 

The new technologies (particularly the internet and CD-Rom) harbour potential for a higher quality of education with many advantages over conventional means: the possibility of tailor-made teaching, taking account of the differing abilities of students; reduced learning time; a more user-friendly approach to subjects; direct contact with the notion of ongoing technological development; the possibility of remote personal development, particularly useful in providing access to education for the disabled, for learning foreign languages and so on, not to mention the considerable progress made in simulation in all fields (medicine, piloting, tests, and so on). (Parliamentary Assembly 1998, p 30).  

This is what the Council of Europe stated in 1998, and in a short time the educational potential of the Internet has become a commonly recognised certainty:   

The use of the web in teaching and learning within higher education is now commonplace... (Graham, McNeil ad Pettiford 2000, p 2) 

The ‘leap’ has been gigantic, rapid, and systematic: nobody now needs to be convinced of the advantages and the opportunities offered by the Information and Communications Technologies in education, and in language learning in particular, and listing them seems almost a useless exercise:

-         each learner can explore sources and use tools following a personal path at a personal pace

-         the improvement of learners’ autonomy achieved thanks to activities and tasks performed individually or in a group with the help of ICT simultaneously increases  the learners’ control and awareness of their learning processes

-         the Internet represents a fast, effective and almost totally inexpensive way to publish the work produced both by students and teachers and this gives a strong motivation to produce better and better work

-         online communication both within the schools and towards the outside world makes class activities real, purposeful  and meaningful because it implies a real information gap

-         the differences of role of the protagonists of the communicative acts (students, teacher, partners, associations, organisations, companies, etc.) give impulse to use the language in different ways according to the target, the aim, the topic of the communication itself

-         the possibility to use different typologies of media through which the messages can be transmitted develops the students’ creativity as well as their ICT skills

-         the integration of the language skills into all the possible combinations (reading and writing, listening and writing, listening and speaking, etc.) gives the opportunity to improve the overall language competence as well as the competence in the content areas involved

-         the possibility to interact with people, organisations, associations, companies, in brief with the outside world, breaks the traditional isolation of schools

-         the use of media that provide a return, a continuous feedback to the communicative acts performed gives the possibility to choose every time how to continue “the game” and decide one’s own path and pace

-         activities where there are stimuli and answers/responses to individual or group questions/demands, an environment where it is possible to ask questions and receive answers make communication in the foreign language tremendously true and motivating.

 Choice, information gap, feedback, these are the characteristics of the communicative acts we hardly succeed in reproducing in our simulations at school when we teach a foreign language. Yet an essential element has been always missing in our simulations: the necessity of communicating by using a code different from the natural one, an element that is the true motivation of communication, which arises from the need to communicate. The Internet, with all its potentials, offers a real environment, even if virtual, where it is possible to make this need to communicate true by using a language that is not our mother tongue.

2.2 – Importance of the methodological framework

The Internet does not have an educational or training capability apart from linking educational and training providers to potential learners. (Forsyth 2001, p 1) 

What does it mean? Is it a contradiction with respect to the ‘triumphant’ words used in the previous point? No, it is simply the recognition of ICT as tools, certainly powerful, but only tools in the hand of and at the service of the people involved in the process, teachers and learners, who have the task and the intelligence to use the potentials of these tools for their own purposes. On the part of the teachers we need a deep knowledge of the students’ needs first, and after that of the possible uses of the technological tools in order to satisfy them. Behind these two points the methodological framework in which every choice must be placed plays the most important role, as it gives sense and meaning to the work, both of the teachers and of the learners. 

One view of the Internet is that it is a technology to deliver information. A more considered view is that access to the Internet as a technology and a delivery tool needs to be considered after the educational methodology is determined. It’s only after an analysis of the educational needs that the use of any technology or audio-visual device as a delivery tool is supportable. (Forsyth 2001, p 6)

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)

2.3 – Levels of ICT integration

There are many different levels of integration of ICT in education, from distance learning courses to the development of projects involving the construction of learning environments on cyberspace for a class and some possible partners, to building Internet-based activities and inserting them inside ‘traditional’ courses, to only introducing from time to time the use of some CD-ROMs or multimedia presentations.

The role of the teacher, obviously, varies from being essentially a course planner and developer often together with more ‘technical’ experts, to performing as a tutor or counsellor, to guiding the students in projects or activities which employ ICT by giving the students both the technical and the ‘cultural’ hints to get through them, or more ordinarily to being a presenter of multimedia products. 

What I am interested in, for the moment, is not distance learning of course, as I teach in a ‘bricks and mortar’ environment where I and my students are physically present in the classroom or in the multimedia laboratory where we regularly meet, but in integrating in the curriculum all the possibilities a teacher and a class can have to exploit ICT in order to improve the knowledge of the foreign language and culture they are trying to approach. I am especially interested in the integration of the online services in teaching through Internet-based activities and projects that can make learning involving, meaningful and effective, not only because I like using computers (and this is also true) but because my teaching experiences of the last 7-8 years have been confirming this.

 2.4 – Internet resources: a classification

Classifying and defining the Internet resources that teachers can use in their classes will make us  aware of how and when they can be useful to the students’ learning objectives. The following is a possible classification, not complete of course, since the amount of resources and their variety are huge:

·        Games and fun websites

There are plenty of them on the Web, and they can be used as motivational moments that have the task to carry the students towards more ‘serious’ activities (to start with a cartoon or a funny story can be a good way to start a lesson).

·        Lessons and tutorials

They are instructional materials dealing with topics related to every subject, delivered at every level of subject mastery.

·        Tools

Different types of tools are available on the net, from the tools necessary to search for information (search engines, meta-search engines) to programs that can be freely downloaded (freeware, shareware) for different purposes, more or less the same purposes we use the main application programs, free software about different subjects, email software, forums, listserv, mailing lists, bulletin boards, newsgroups, chat, etc.

·        Information collections

They are often searchable and for this they represent a fast way to find the needed information. Examples of this kind of Internet resources are online libraries, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, glossaries, media collections (pictures, animations, video, music, etc), educational sites, informational sites, databases, archives, directories, etc.

·        Specific resources

A specific resource is not and does not want to be complete, it only focuses on one topic or area, usually presented from a declared biased perspective, that can be economic, culturally or politically orientated, even personal, as there are many personal web pages that can offer personal perspectives on the topics they deal with. These resources provide information or experiences; it’ up to the teacher or learners to evaluate them, their perspective and their reliability in order to integrate them into a learning activity.

·        Projects

Web based projects, either collaborative large long-term or class short-term projects, start with the usual involvement of interdisciplinary research, reading, writing, artistic creation, etc., and, in the end, they add all the features and power of the Internet to create a world context. Quests, partnerships, interactive web projects,  web resources, databases, tutorials, videoconferencing or chat, email, forums, and offline multimedia are the means employed and combined to allow learners to explore and carry out each particular step of the whole project.

·        Activities

Activities (such as brain storming, discussion, defining key words and concepts, lab experiments, treasure hunts, problem solving, webquests, etc) are the heart of what goes on in a classroom. They are also present on the Web but not in big quantity. This is not a problem, as creating suitable and effective activities is the main strategy for classroom teachers to correctly integrate the Web into their students’ specific learning needs, with the help of all the resources previously mentioned plus the traditional ones, of course.

As we can deduce from this list, most of the Internet resources are to be considered as “authentic material”, that is materials not originally designed for educational purposes. This is what makes their use more interesting as they represent the expression of the real world (economic, informational, institutional, associational  and also educational) that has the possibility to get and keep in touch with the school context, usually thought of as an isolated and protected place where everything is filtered and fitted to the students’ ‘level’. It is only up to the teachers to guide the choice of the appropriate materials and eventually transform them into effective educational materials by creating activities and projects tailored to the specific context of their classes and outcome-orientated.

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