Language Teaching and the Internet

Usenet is a subset of the Internet as a whole, but is often confused with it. Usenet can be thought of as a huge public email system where the recipient of your message is anyone who cares to read it. Sending a message to a Usenet newsgroup is called "posting," since the action is somewhat like posting a message to a bulletin board in real life. You post a message and go away, then someone comes along and reads it. They may, in turn, post a response to your message on the same bulletin board.

One difference between Usenet newsgroups and email mailing lists is that the messages do not come to your personal email box: you must go to that newsgroup in order to read the messages. Each newsgroup is centered around a particular discussion topic, evidenced by the title of that group. For example, rec.pets.cats is a recreational (rec) group for discussing pet cats, while mx.deportes.gimnasticos is a Mexican (mx) newsgroup devoted to discussion of the sport (deportes) of gimnasticos.

Newsgroups are arranged in several hierarchies: rec (recreational), comp (computers), news (about Usenet), and misc (miscellaneous) are the main ones, and are mostly out of the U.S. Other groups may start with an abbreviation for the name of the country, such as "mx" for Mexico, or the name of a local organization such as "unr" for University of Nevada, Reno. These top-level hierarchies make up the first part of a newsgroup's name.

Newsgroup names are chosen so that more newsgroups can be added under similar branches. Thus the "rec.pets" set of newsgroups includes "rec.pets.cats," "rec.pets.birds," and "rec.pets.horses." Sometimes, the number of messages sent to a single newsgroup gets so large that the group will split into several. Thus, what was once simply "rec.pets.dogs" is now "rec.pets.dogs.behavior," "rec.pets.dogs.breeds," "rec.pets.dogs.health," "rec.pets.dogs.misc," etc. You can see how the name of a newsgroup is chosen to allow many different categories to be tacked onto the end as the traffic in the group expands. In this case, by choosing "pets" as the second term, we gain a large number of newsgroups devoted to various domestic animals and can search for our own pet of interest much more easily.

Newsgroups in the main hierarchies must be voted upon in order to become active groups. Of course, anyone with a news server may create a group, but most system administrators will only carry those groups which have been successfully voted into existence. If your system carries the "alt" groups, you may wish to look at the result of newsgroup creation run wild. I've seen groups called "alt.what.do.you.want.to.do" and "alt.I.don't.know.what.do.you.want.to.do." This sort of thing really irritates the older members of the Internet community.

Reading News

To read a newsgroup, you must first have a news reader of some sort. As with mail readers, there are several of these in existence, and they all differ from one another. One thing which many of them have in common, however, is that you must "subscribe" to a newsgroup before you can read or post to it. Usually subscribing is no more than pressing the right key or clicking on a "Subscribe" button in your news reader. Many modern web browsers have newsreaders built in, so that you won't have to call up a separate program

Unix systems have what is called a .newsrc ("dot news R.C." or "dot news-wreck") file which contains a list of all the groups to which you are subscribed and sometimes a list of those to which you are not. Other systems may also have a file with such a list. If you're comfortable with computers, you may wish to edit this file by hand to keep track of the newsgroups you've chosen.

One thing to remember is that any newsgroup which begins with rec, alt, comp, misc, or news is probably read by hundreds or thousands of people all over the world. Netiquette for newsgroups requires that you read the messages in the group for awhile before you post. This is to avoid sending an inappropriate or irrelevant message to the group. You should also read the newsgroup's Frequently Asked Questions list or "FAQ" (if there is one) before asking questions, in case the question has already been answered many times over. Be aware that you cannot always tell what a newsgroup is about simply by the title. For example, the newgroup "misc.education.language.english" is primarily for ESL/FL teachers. Those who post messages about teaching English to native English speakers are setting themselves up for a mild suggestion that they go elsewhere or even a flame.

The Facts about FAQs

A newsgroup's FAQ is usually created so that frequently asked questions can be answered in a single spot. However, there are also many FAQs about the topics discussed. The FAQ for misc.education.language.english (or "mele") is comprised of a tremendous amount of information on teaching English and is a valuable resource for those who would like to get started in ELT.

FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions, began as a primarily Usenet phenomenon. With potentially many hundreds of people posting messages to a newsgroup, someone decided that by posting a text file of frequently asked questions with their answers, they could save quite a bit of bandwidth. The FAQ for a newsgroup might explain the group's charter, its main focus of discussion, the preferences of the group's subscribers in terms of which types of messages were appropriate, and a list of questions that were often asked in that group.

As time has gone on, FAQs have appeared for a variety of topics other than the operation of a newsgroup. A newsgroup devoted to the fans of an author may have a FAQ that talks about how many books she has written, what her pen names are, and where she likes to go dancing. The rec.pets.cats newsgroup has several separate FAQs each devoted to a particular breed of cat. FAQs are not only a Usenet phenomenon: Worldwide Web pages which demonstrate a computer progam may have FAQs posted about how to use it, and FAQs on many topics are constantly springing up.

A FAQ is often quite comprehensive, and the better ones are the size of a short handbook, ranging from 40 to 100 pages when printed. They can be quite valuable sources of information, as a great deal of research goes into them. In short, upon subscribing to a newsgroup for the first time, try to find out if it has a FAQ.

The vast majority of newsgroups, like most aspects of the Internet, use English as the primary language of communication. However, there are also many groups run in other countries in the native language of that country so that you may be able to find interesting groups for your students.