Language Teaching and the Internet

Internet email allows offers a valuable opportunity to take your students outside of their classroom and let them communicate with others of similar interests all over the world. There are several mailing lists set up specifically for students of English and many others set up for different interest groups. These mailing lists can help the student make new friends, and can inspire them to continue using email. Warning: Know how to use the lists first!

A bit of a warning is in order here: it is always best to subscribe to a mailing list such as FLTEACH for a while before attempting to sign your students on to one of these lists. If you are conversant with the commands and procedures, you'll find it much easier to help your students when they run into problems. That a teacher should be familiar with any technology he or she uses should be axiomatic; unfortunately, at least a few teachers have been in such a great hurry to use the Internet that they have begun using the technology before fully understanding it themselves. Some teachers who would not dream of using a textbook in class before reading it often throw their students onto the Internet (sometimes at well-meaning administrators' requests) without navigating it a bit first. As you can well imagine, this often creates many more problems than it solves and leaves both teacher and student frustrated and wondering what all the fuss was about.

Most lists send a helpful message out when a student subscribes. You'll most likely want to help your class print out or otherwise save these messages, as they will prove helpful later on. You may want to take some time in class to discuss the welcome message, and to make sure that your students understand them. A brief introduction to Netiquette is also included with these messages, and can provide more fodder for class discussion.

Using General Interest Mailing Lists for Students

For more advanced students, and for materials to use in class, there are literally thousands of Listserv mailing lists on thousands of topics. By sending a message to any Listserv address with the words 'list global,' you can receive a file which contains a list of all current lists along with brief descriptions. Before doing this, however, take note: this compilation will create a very large file, almost 800 kilobytes. You'll want to make sure that your mailbox can handle such a large file.

You can also search for a list on a specific topic such as "linguistics" by sending a message to a Listserv with the command 'list global /linguistics'. With this option, the Listserv will return only those lists with "linguistics" in the name or in the description, thus cutting down on the size of the file. Note, however, that using a key word such as "the" or "a" will return almost as large a file as the "global" command alone. The more specific you can be in your choice of word, the better.

Searching the Listserv can be helpful if you intend to use these lists with your class. Some teachers elicit areas of interest from their students, such as different sports, pets, hobbies, computers, celebrities, writers, etc, and then look for a list which discusses one of their interests in the target language. The teacher can then have the student subscribe to the list so he or she can practice reading and writing on a topic of personal interest. Students can report later on the list's discussions.

If your students do not have access to Internet e-mail themselves, you can do what others in the same situation have done: subscribe yourself to these lists, then print and hand out some of the messages to your students for discussion. One exercise could be to have the students read the messages, and compose a reply or replies for a "pseudo-discussion." This is a good way to offer supplemental material from outside the text and perhaps to encourage students' interest in reading and writing about topics of interest to them.