Article 73: Language teaching in the Internet age. By Eric Baber

The weekly column

Article 73, August 2001

Language teaching in the Internet age

By Eric Baber

The Internet is being heralded as a great development in all areas of life, including education. But does it really offer a solution to all our educational needs? Will it make language learning a snap, and will we all finally be able to learn "Spanish in 10 easy lessons"? Will it put classroom teachers out of jobs? This article looks at the various opportunities the Internet currently offers for language teaching and learning, how it is being exploited, and highlights some of the advantages and disadvantages of the various uses.

What is the 'net?

First of all, it is necessary to look at what exactly the Internet is. The Internet is an international network of computers which makes it possible to share information between the various computers in various ways.

One common misconception is that the Internet is the same as the World-Wide Web (WWW, or the Web) and/or e-mail. That's not the case. The Internet is merely an infrastructure which allows information to be shared, sent or received in various ways; the World-Wide Web, e-mail and conferencing systems are actual uses of this infrastructure. An analogy is a motorway system - a motorway allow cars, busses and lorries to get from one place to another, in the same way that the Internet allows information to get from one place to another in various ways.

Common uses of the Internet for language teaching

Probably the most extensively used Internet delivery method for language teaching is the World-Wide Web. The WWW allows a teacher with website design skills to put up a website containing content of their choice. In its simplest form, a website can contain texts for language learners to read through, with tasks that they are encouraged to perform in order to "enhance their reading skills". If the teacher has somewhat more advanced website-design skills, he or she can add self-correcting tasks to the website such as multiple-choice exercises, gapfills and more.

For pronunciation development, a teacher can record model words, phrases or sentences, put them on the website, and learners can listen to them in their own time in order to "improve their receptive skills". The teacher may then encourage the visitors to record their own version of the words or phrases, and e-mail the recording to him or her for evaluation or correction. However, unless the teacher charges for such a service, (s)he is under no obligation to actually listen to any such recordings e-mailed to him or her, or to reply to the writer.

At the top of the range of such websites there are complete online courses, usually designed and maintained by large EFL/ESL companies who have the resources to develop such sites[1]. Such courses may offer reading, grammar, vocabulary and other exercises at different levels, have areas of the website where students can write messages to each other and so on.

There are a number of advantages of web-based teaching. The main one is that it's available "24/7" - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The website never needs to sleep, unlike a human teacher. This means that if a student quickly needs help with a certain language area, they are quite likely to be able to find some sort of help or support quite quickly.

The other advantage is that it can be free, or relatively inexpensive, to many users. Many websites are completely free since they were made by teachers in their spare time, while others (in general, ones produced professionally) charge a nominal fee. However, in addition to the actual cost of using a web-based course it is necessary to add the actual cost of being online, and this can quickly add up in some countries.

On the other hand, there are also some disadvantages to web-based forms of learning. Perhaps the most crucial one is that of motivation: in order to follow a self-study course of any kind, a student needs to have a high level of intrinsic motivation. Of course the quality plays a large role with regards to the likelihood of completing the entire course, but even the best self-study course will suffer from a relatively high drop-out rate.

Another drawback is that the response a website can give to a student's language production is by its very nature quite restricted. For multiple-choice or gap-fill activities, for example, the website will only accept as correct those answers it has been programmed to accept. Any other answers will be rejected, even if they would be perfectly acceptable to a human teacher.

What can make an enormous difference to students taking a web-based course is e-mail support. Being able to e-mail a tutor in order to request clarification on a specific point will help overcome some of the inevitable limitations of a web-based system, and will also allow the teacher to encourage and thereby motivate the learner.

Finally, one point that is frequently made is that virtually all exercise-types and materials available on websites are, or could be, just as easily and effectively produced in books or on CD-ROMs. This is a valid argument, the main difference being in cost of distribution and ease of update. Production costs of a website tend to be significantly lower than those of a CD-ROM or a book, and these savings can be passed on to the end-consumer, thereby making the material more affordable to a larger number of people. In essence, though, many of the exercise types have been seen already in some form or another, and have merely moved to websites.

E-mail on the other hand, either in conjunction with a web-based course or on its own, is a medium which allows distance teaching and learning to take place in a more "human" fashion. There are a number of ways e-mails can be used for teaching: teachers can use it to distribute "phrases of the day" for students to digest in their own time[2]. This, though, isn't really making full use of the medium, since this form of teaching is one-directional, while e-mail allows for two or more-directional communication. More useful is a programme in which a teacher e-mails one or more students a task of some sort to complete, which is then returned to the teacher for marking and correction. Taking it one step further, the teacher can set up a so-called e-mail discussion group, which allows students to easily e-mail all group participants[3]. Such a system allows the teacher to set a group of students a task which requires them to communicate with each other by e-mail, thereby encouraging productive writing skills. The teacher may choose to monitor the ongoing e-mail conversations and make corrections, or just await the outcome of the task, commenting on its content and language as appropriate.

As mentioned before, e-mail also allows the teacher to send recorded audio-clips to the students, and the students to reply with their own for commenting and correction[4].

The benefits of using e-mail for teaching are that it is often more motivating for students than web-based learning as it gives them an opportunity to interact with other students and a teacher, albeit largely on a written level. Also, as students can be in different locations around the world and have different backgrounds and jobs, this offers a ready information-gap for the teacher to exploit.

Similarly to web-based learning, e-mail study can often be self-paced, meaning students can work on an assignment or task when it suits them. Should they have questions or queries along the way they can e-mail their tutor for clarification. E-mail learning also allows students to take their time when formulating their thoughts; especially for learners who feel pressured in classroom lessons this can be very valuable.

Drawbacks of e-mail projects can be time-zone issues and general availability. No teacher will be able to monitor their e-mails 24 hours a day, and if a group e-mail project hinges on a crucial piece of information that needs to be clarified by the tutor, the group may have to wait 10 or more hours for clarification at times. Similarly, if the students participating in the group-project are in different time-zones, have work commitments or are travelling and don't have e-mail access for a few days, a group project can fall apart as a result[5].

Internet conferencing meanwhile is probably the least-known form of online teaching. While Internet conferencing has been around since at least 1997, and has been used largely for business communication (and as such it has been used extensively), the language-teaching community does not yet appear to have discovered its potential. Internet conferencing allows the teacher and the student(s) to connect with each other live at a pre-arranged time and then speak to each other, see each other, work on documents together on their respective screens and more. It is similar to videoconferencing but with the crucial difference of taking place entirely via the Internet from a desktop computer. It therefore does not incur any long-distance telephone costs or initial setup-costs beyond those of a regular computer, a headset and possibly a webcam, despite participants being able to speak to each other just like during a telephone call.

Using Internet conferencing it is possible to hold live lessons which are very similar to a classroom-based one. The teacher can prepare materials on a so-called whiteboard; this can be opened during the lesson and displayed to all students in the lesson, who can then view and manipulate it. This allows the teacher to prepare materials such as visuals for students to describe using audio, gap-fills, vocabulary mix'n'match exercises and more. At any point during the lesson the students can save the whiteboard file onto their own computer for future reference. Such a system also allows the student to show the teacher documents they may have prepared for their work, for example if a student needs to give a presentation the following week in English and has prepared a PowerPoint presentation, the teacher can ask them to do a mock-presentation showing him or her the PowerPoint slides and narrating them just as he will do in real life. Especially for business students this can be an invaluable exercise.

One important benefit of such live, online teaching is high motivation for a number of reasons. For some students it may be the first contact they have had with a native-speaker teacher, which in itself can be valuable. In addition, though, the fact of studying in a group lesson with other students who are in different countries can be fascinating and exciting. Similarly to e-mail projects, this gives the teacher the added advantage of having a built-in information gap to exploit of which most students are highly appreciative as well. Due to these factors it is quite unusual for a student to discontinue a course before its completion.

With the constant improvement of Internet connectivity around the globe the audio quality tends to be very good as well, thereby allowing the teacher to work on all skills with the students in a very realistic environment. If desired, the teacher is able to focus on problems and weaknesses as and when they occur, which can be very valuable to students.

Drawbacks of live online lessons are that time-zones can cause challenges. When trying to arrange a lesson between a teacher in the UK, for instance, and a student in Japan, at least one of the two may have to join the lesson at a time which may not be very convenient for them. Furthermore, such lessons are invariably more costly than web-based or even e-mail lessons as they require a relatively large input of teacher-time. However, the effectiveness may well be higher due to increased motivation, access to a realistic situation in which the learner is faced with unpredictable language input, and immediate tutor feedback when appropriate.

So what about our jobs then?

It is probably safe to say that the Internet, or rather the teaching that is being done via the Internet, is not going to replace teacher-led learning for quite some time yet, if ever. While web-based and e-mail teaching can be very useful and convenient, they are likely to take second place to human-led teaching in terms of desirability. Of course financial considerations will always play a part, but like CD-ROMs and self-study cassettes, Internet-based self-access courses are likely to be supplements as opposed to replacements for teacher-led learning.

The future of Internet videoconferencing on the other hand is less clear. It allows for the "human touch" that many learners feel is necessary, though it can't completely replicate all aspects of the physical classroom experience, of course. Its advantages, though, such as decreased travel time for a live teaching experience are likely to cause more and more learners to favour this method over the classroom one.

What is extremely likely to happen, though, is that students will look for programmes that offer them a choice of learning opportunities to suit their learning styles and needs. Schools that can offer students pre- and/or post-sessional online courses, or that can offer their students replacement videoconferencing lessons while they are travelling, are likely to be more interesting to students than those that don't. Similarly, teachers who have experience and/or qualifications in online teaching will become more attractive to schools who already have online components, or feel the need to set up an online teaching programme.

As always, it will be the teachers and schools who are more forward-looking and who endeavour to keep pace with developments in other business areas who will keep the edge over the others, and who will be able to offer their students the best learning opportunities available.

[1] Examples of complete web-based courses are NetLanguages (http://www.netlanguages.com) by International House, Barcelona, and Englishtown (http://www.englishtown.com) by EF.

[2] An example of a "Phrase of the day" e-mail system can be found at http://www.travlang.com/wordofday.

[3] For more information on setting up or using an e-mail discussion group please visit http://www.yahoogroups.com or http://www.listbot.com .

[4] For information on a project involving pronunciation work by e-mail visit http://fs.broward.cc.fl.us/~sdonahue/teaching-online.html .

[5] For a description of an e-mail project please visit http://www.hut.fi/~rvilmi/Project .

About the author

Eric Baber is Director of Studies of NetLearn Languages, an online-only language school. NLL has been teaching English, Spanish, Italian and other languages live online since 1998 and in that time has had students take part in its courses from over 30 countries. NLL also offers a number of evening talks, full-day seminars and longer courses on a range of Internet-and-ELT related topics.