Abstract: The
potentials of the Internet, and Information and Communications
Technologies in general, can represent a tremendous support to the
work of the EFL teachers only if they integrate these resources into a
curriculum based on a clear 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 what can seem only a
practical procedure.
The Internet resources can
dramatically enlarge the repertoire of educational tools that a
teacher can bring into the class; they allow teachers and learners to
extend their access both to areas devised for students and teachers
and to “authentic” materials dealing with every type of content, not
designed for educational purposes, but that can be exploited as
educational materials; they bring every type of information within
reach and present it in attractive and ever changing forms, suitable
and comprehensible to every level of language or content competence;
they allow to get in touch with different types of media, texts,
styles, and registers, so improving language understanding and
producing. Finally they give to both teachers and students the
possibility to promote communicative exchanges and collaboration
inside and outside the classroom.
The awareness that the
foreign language teacher’s task is to provide the students with a
further code that can allow them to enlarge their cultural richness
and be active protagonists in interpreting the world around them by
taking part in a much larger range of relationships should guide our
everyday work and the choice of the tools that better can make this
true.
These basic ideas are
developed in this work because they represent the core rationale
behind the activities observed, described, analysed and discussed in
this case study on a first class of an Italian high school
(14-year-old students) in which we try to exploit the opportunities
offered by the Internet in order to transform the formal environment
of the school setting into a place where using a foreign language is
less unnatural and prevent us for a while from thinking that English
is only a school subject.
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