Selecting and Using Internet Material In University English Classes

Victoria Muehleisen, Waseda University

The Internet as a Source of Authentic Material
As a foreign language teacher, my main goal is to help students develop strategies for understanding English language material and for using their language skills for their own purposes outside the classroom. As pointed out by Phillips and Shettlesworth (1987), however, the kinds of teaching material used in language classrooms may generate a kind of classroom discourse far removed from the kinds of discourse found outside the classroom, a fact which "entails the necessity of creating the conditions for activities which encourage the student to transfer the language taught in the classroom to use in communicative situations." They suggest that this can be effectively done by bringing authentic material into the classroom and using them both as as examples of natural language use (e.g., illustrating grammatical points) and as a stimulus for a variety of communicative acts (for example, note-taking exercises or oral reports).
While Phillips and Shettlesworth focus on the use of authentic material in an ESP context, the points they make are valid in other language learning contexts as well. For example, I find that in my university level American language and culture classes, traditional language teaching material (in this case, textbooks and tapes aimed at EFL/ESL students) are a very useful and arguably necessary starting point for language instruction, but they are not sufficient in providing the range of language forms that my students want to master; that is, while my students want to be able to read and understand their EFL textbooks, their goals in learning English go far beyond this. At the same time, as my classes focus on the comparison of American and Japanese culture, I share Kramsch's (1993, p. 202) goal of giving my students access to as large a cultural context as possible, while at the same time helping them to understand and then critically consider the meaning of what they encounter. Any textbook, including those I use in my classes, is necessarily limited in the range of viewpoints and cultural information it can provide. For this reason, I have turned to authentic material, including newspapers, videos, and especially the Internet, to expand on the kinds of language and the range of ideas to which students are exposed. I believe that this material helps my students to develop their skills and confidence in using English to
communicate for their own purposes.
But what exactly is authentic material and how can it best be used? These questions are still the subject of much debate. Although there seems to be general agreement that "an authentic text is a text that was created to fulfill some social purpose in the language community in which it was produced" (Little and Singleton 1988, as quoted in Kramsch 1993, p. 177), there is less agreement over which particular texts fit this definition. Are texts produced specifically for language learners excluded from the category of authentic material? Or, as Davies (1984, p. 183) argues, should such simplified texts be considered authentic on the basis that it is the learner's understanding of a text which makes it authentic? Should our goal be to provide texts which learners can comprehend to a high degree, as Davies suggests? Or, as Phillips and Shettlesworth argue, must we accept that "total comprehension often has to be abandoned as a lesson aim" (1987, p. 197)? The teachers who are actively using Internet material in their classroom represent the full range of views, from Dunkley (1997) who uses simplified Internet-derived material off-line, to Mennim and Moore (1998), whose students find and choose material based on their own interests, and use this material as a basis for oral and visual presentations.
My own approach is somewhere in between the two extremes. For the most part, my
students don't search for Internet material themselves; instead, they work with sites I have preselected. However, I don't simplify the material in any way. Instead I choose materials which I judge to be fairly accessible to students in their original form, and I then create exercises to help guide the students in understanding the material. In terms of linguistic difficulty, my selection criteria are rather intuitive; I consider such factors as the average sentence length and the difficulty of the vocabulary, of course, but I also pay attention to features relevant specifically to hypertext, e.g., the number of links, the ease with which links can be navigated, and the presence or absence of distracting or confusing graphics (including advertising!). However, linguistic difficulty is not the only factor that must be considered. As Kramsch (1993, p. 188) points out, "The issue that is raised by the use of real-life materials is that culture is a reality that is social, political, and ideological and that the difficulty in understanding cultural codes stems from the difficulty of viewing the world from another perspective, not of grasping the lexical or grammatical code." Of course, it is precisely this difficulty which makes authentic material exciting and challenging for students. As will be explained below, I attempt to control the cultural difficulty by choosing Internet material closely related to the topics we have been talking about in class and reading about in our textbooks and/or which deal which questions and issues that have already been raised by students in class discussions.
Easily Accessible Pages: Fact Sheets and Statistics
In terms of both linguistic and cultural difficulty, web sites which include "fact sheets", that is pages which give information in the form on short lists of statistics and/or brief descriptions, are usually easy for even lower level university students to deal with. Such fact sheets are accessible in their original form because the total volume of information on the page is usually limited (as compared with, for example, an on-line newspaper article), and they also contain clear headings, e.g., "Population" or "Climate", which help to orient students. And since we have already read and discussed material on the same topic before viewing the fact sheets, students are already primed for much of the vocabulary they will encounter.
As one example, in my Elementary English (EE) class we used a fact sheet as a follow-up
to reading and discussion of an article in Mini-World Magazine about Nunavit, the new
Inuit-majority territory in northwestern Canada. (This article, in turn, touched on themes already brought up in a textbook reading on Native Americans in the U.S.). The article mentioned that the economy of the region was depressed, with a low average income but a higher than average cost of living, and described how the Inuit hoped to stimulate the economy through tourism and through taxes on oil production. A fact sheet prepared by the Canadian Bureau of Indian and Northern Affairs helped the students to understand the factors behind the economic conditions in Nunavit.
The fact sheet contained some statistics which were already familiar to students from the article, (e.g., population, miles of paved road), but others were new. Students worked in pairs, looking through the fact sheet to find information they could use to answer specific questions: "Why is the average income lower than the rest of Canada? Why is the cost of living so much higher?" This activity was done on-line; that is, the students logged on to the computer and went to the web site via a link from the EE class page. However, it could have been done off-line as well, with the page having been downloaded and copied.
As students worked, I circulated around the classroom, seeing how each pair was doing and helping those who needed it. When it seemed that most students had found some relevant information, we talked about the questions as a class. As usual, I asked for volunteers or called on students who I knew had found the "right answer" while working in pairs; at this point, I or the students defined difficult vocabulary. We found that two of the fast facts in particular went along way toward explaining the economics of the region:
From "Fast Facts about Nunavit" www.inac.gc.ca/nunavut/Backgrounder/facts.htm
Economic activities: mining, tourism, shrimp and scallop fishing, hunting and trapping,
arts and crafts production
Transportation: one 21-kilometre government-maintained road between Arctic Bay and
Nanisivik; air connection between communities; daily air connection between Iqaluit and
Montreal/Ottawa; and annual summer sea-lift by ship and barge for transport of construction materials, dry goods, non-perishable food, trucks and cars, etc.
Students were able to make the connection between the method of transporting goods and
the high cost of living, and between the ways of making a living and the low incomes. As a follow-up, students used the Fast Facts as well as two other sites, an agency promoting tours in Nunavit and a page about the culture and traditions of the Inuit, to estimate how likely it was that tourism would be successful in Nunavit. These sites were fairly accessible because they had many photos and only a limited amount of language.
Web pages which contain statistics are also usually quite accessible to students, and are readily integrated with other course material. On-line almanacs and encyclopedias such as Information Please www.infoplease.com are sites that can be put to many different uses. For example, when discussing the textbook chapter on "The American Religious Heritage", students in Intermediate English (IE) were very interested in learning more about volunteer work and charitable donations in the U.S. They asked me, "Who does volunteer work? Students? Housewives? What kinds of volunteer work are popular? Who do they give donations to?" While I had general impressions about the situation in the U.S., I didn't feel confident that I could answer authoritatively; I was pleased to discover some useful data on the Information Please site after a search using "statistics", "volunteer activities", and "U.S." as keywords.
Students worked in pairs to look at the statistics on-line. Using a chart showing "Percent of the Adult Population Doing Volunteer Work", students looked for answers to the following questions:
Which kinds of people do the most volunteer work? Look at age, gender, ethnic group,in-come and educational background. What kinds of volunteer activities are most popular? Does anything surprise you about these statistics?
Then while looking at a chart of the "Top 20 Charities in the U.S." (the organizations
that receive the most donations), students considered these questions:
Which of these organizations have you heard of? Which organizations seem to involve
religion as well as charitable work? Are you surprised by any of the organizations on
this list?
While the students were exploring the sites, I encouraged them to use the encyclopedia
and dictionary features of the Information Please site to look up terms they did not
know (e.g. "Salvation Army"). The class discussion that followed was quite lively—among other things, students were surprised to discover that a lot of the volunteer work was religious volunteer work.
Finding the fact sheets and statistics
I found the fact sheets and statistics described above above using the search engine Ask Jeeves at www.askjeeves.com. At this site, you type in a question such as "Where can I find out about Nunavit?" or "Where can I find statistics about volunteer work in the U.S.?" The search engine then compares your question to similar questions it already has on file and directs you to web sites with relevant information. One reason I use the AskJeeves site more often than other search engines is that it simultaneously sends your request to several other search engines and lists the top results. This means that even if Ask Jeeves doesn't have the relevant information (for example, it did not have any questions on file about Nunavit), you can quickly scan the top results of other search engines and check the pages that look promising.
How long will it take to find the information you want? That question is impossible to answer, although I can say that you should not expect to sit down and find relevant material 15 minutes before class starts. How long it takes to find material on a particular topic depends on how much material there is available on that topic as well as your effectiveness at using search engines. Learning to use search engines effectively is a skill that can only be developed with practice, although guides such as Ryan (1997) may help you speed up the process. There is also a great deal of helpful information posted on the Internet itself; see, for example, the list of on-line articles about using search engines available at http://web.hamline.edu/Administration/Libraries/searchcomparisons.html
You can also save time by compiling a list of useful reference sites as you come across
them. My list includes the following, all of which can be searched using key terms:
Information Please On-line Dictionary, Internet Encyclopedia, and Almanac Reference
http://www.infoplease.com/
The 3D atlas On-line
http://www.3datlas.com/
The CIA World Factbook http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
The WWW Virtual Library
http://www.w3.org/vl/.
Finally, you may want to refer to some of the many Internet reference guides in book and CD-ROM form, such as the Internet Guide for English Language Teachers (Sperling, 1997).
Web Sites of Social Organizations and Non-Profit Groups
More difficult but culturally richer material can be found on the various WWW sites created by groups to promote their activities and explain their point of view. Unlike textbooks and newspaper reports, such material gives students a chance to make "direct contact" with a new perspective. However, these sites can often be overwhelming—too much material, at too difficult a level. With these sites, then, it is often best to use accessibility as the most important selection criterion. This is not to say that content should be ignored, but in cases where there are a variety of sites with roughly similar cultural content to choose from, teachers may wish to select the sites which seem most appropriate for the linguistic level of the students.
For example, students in both EE and IE were interested in Native Americans. Their textbooks briefly dealt with the forced moves of aboriginal people to reservations, but the students wanted to know more about what had happened and about where and how Native Americans live today. Fortunately, a great deal of useful material is to be found on the home pages of various American Indian tribes.
Using the search terms "Native Americans", "American Indians" "history" and "reservations" as keywords, I found links to a large number of sites. The most useful for me (but not necessarily for my students) was the American Indian Resources Library at http://www.westerndelaware.nsn.us/air/default.htm which included links to the home pages of many different Indian tribes. After looking at many sites, I finally chose two whose front pages seemed the most "user friendly" for the students in that they had clear layouts, with only a few links, and fairly easy language. These were the home page of the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of California at http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~adamw/tribal/mechoopda.html and the home page of the Lenni Lenape Tribe at http://www.delawaretribeofindians.nsn.us/. As in the
activities described above, the students worked together to answer questions, followed by class discussion. The students then had some time to freely browse through the sites further, following links and clicking on photos and sound files.
The IE class also viewed a somewhat less accessible page, that of Navajo Central Web at
http://www.navajocentral.org/. This page was confusing even for me to use because of
the layout: the links were not clearly labeled, and some of them did not function correctly.
However, I wanted to include this site because it included information closely related to class themes, such as a link to a discussion of the terms "Native American" vs. "American Indian" which tied in with a previous lesson on "PC" terms (described below). Because this site was difficult to use, I provided more guidance than usual, putting the page up on the monitor for everyone to see and directing students to particular links.
Using Web Sites for your own Purposes
Something to keep in mind is that web sites can be used as authentic material even if they are not exactly used for their original purposes. As one example, we used web sites of American University student clubs to study the use of "politically correct" terms, a topic of great interest to my IE students. In their textbook, they had read the results of a poll on the use of "African-American" versus "Black" and "Hispanic" versus "Latino", but they were not fully convinced of the textbook's claim that there were no "right" terms. They also wanted to know about other terms not mentioned in the text.
I turned to the WWW to find more information, but my initial search using "PC" and "political correctness" yielded material that was either irrelevant or not appropriate (e.g., discussion group messages ranting about the use of a particular PC term). Searches with terms such as "Black" and "African-American" were hardly more useful since they led to far too many matches. But one match did catch my eye—African-American Alliance, a university student club. Looking at that page, I realized that university club names could be used to investigate which terms were currently in use, so I changed my search strategy to look for listings of clubs on university home pages. After viewing several, I chose two—SUNY-Buffalo and Western Washington University—which listed their clubs by category rather than alphabetically, letting the students focus in on the clubs which were likely to include PC terms in their names (i.e., the clubs listed under "People of Color" at SUNY and "Cultural/Ethnic Clubs" at Western Washington). I made a web page which contained links to these pages as well as questions to focus on (see Appendix A); students worked independently to view the sites and then the class together discussed what they had found.
Concluding Remarks
Although there is a wide range of authentic material which can be successfully used in
language classrooms, Internet material has some particular features which sets it apart from more traditional material such as newspapers or videos. Firstly, for the near future at least, the Internet has a certain "novelty appeal". My students are excited by the idea of the Internet itself and are glad to be able to gain skills in web navigation that that can immediately put to use outside of the classroom. Secondly, the organization of hypertexts and multimedia (including web pages) is quite different from that of "regular" texts and videos. As Kramsch (1993, pp. 200-201) describes it, the non-linearity and recursiveness of hypertexts invites relational thinking and hierarchical structuring and encourage students to reinterpret and reorganize material as they move through a text. While the exercises in my class start with a focus on a particular page, there is also time for students to explore the sites further on their own, following links to find their own ways through the material. Links to the pages used in class are also posted on my home page so that students can return to the material again outside of class .
The approach outlined here is time consuming; it takes time to find appropriate material and to write questions to guide the students in understanding the material, but I believe that it is time well-spent. And my students agree—in their class evaluations, most of them specifically mention the Internet component as something they found particularly enjoyable and valuable. Whatever topics you cover in your classes, there is almost certainly relevant information somewhere out there on the Internet. Why not try putting some of it to use in your classes next term?
References
Daniel, D. (1997). Internet-derived material in the classroom. In P. Lewis and T. Shiozawa (Eds.), CALL: Basics and beyond: The proceedings of the Second Annual JALT CALL N-SIG Conference. Nagoya, Japan: Chubu Nihon Kyouiku Bunkakai.
Davies, A. (1984). Simple, simplified, and simplification; what is authentic. In J. Alderson and A. H. Urquart (Eds.), Reading in a foreign language. London: Longman.
Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mennim, P. and P. Moore. (1998). The WWW as content in an undergraduate English curriculum. In P. Lewis (Ed.), Teachers, learners, and computers: Exploring relationships in CALL. Nagoya, Japan: Chubu Nihon Kyouiku Bunkakai.
Phillips, M. K. & Shettlesworth, C. C. (1987). How to arm your students: A consideration of two approaches to providing materials for ESP. In M. Long and J. Richards, (Eds.), Methodology in TESOL: A Book of Readings (pp. 105-111). Newbury House.
Ryan, K. (1997). Using search engines for academic research. In P. Lewis and T. Shiozawa (Eds.), CALL: Basics and beyond: The proceedings of the Second Annual JALT CALL N-SIG Conference. Nagoya, Japan: Chubu Nihon Kyouiku Bunkakai.
Sperling, D. (1997). The Internet guide for English language teachers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.


Appendix A
Instructions for the activity "Exploring Diversity and Political Correctness at
American Universities"
As we read in Chapter 1 of The American Ways, people in the U.S. have become sensitive about the terms which are used to describe different ethic and racial groups; using terms that the people in the groups prefer to call themselves is sometimes called "Political Correctness" (PC).
What terms do American university students prefer? The answers vary from person to person and from region to region, but you can get some idea by looking at the names and home pages of student clubs at a few different schools. By looking at these pages, you can also find some other PC terms such as "Asian Pacific Islander" and "Native Alaskan."
1. Start with the Electronic Club Directory. the State University of New York,
Buffalo http://wings.buffalo.edu/student-life/sa/sawww/clubs/index.html.
As you explore this site, think about the following:
Notice that the clubs are divided into categories. One of these is "People of Color" (which is itself a PC term, replacing "minority"). What clubs are included in this category? Which terms do the people in this groups choose to call themselves?
Check out the "Special Interest" clubs. How do the people in these groups refer to
themselves?
Next, check out the "Service Clubs". Are there are clubs like this at Waseda?
Finally, look go to the home page of the Office of Student Multicultural Affairs at
SUNY-Buffalo. What is the function of this office? What terms are used in the web pages of this office?
2. Next, compare the student clubs at theWestern Washington University in
Bellingham, Washington (located between Seattle and Vancouver).
http://www.as.wwu.edu/clubs/clubs.html
Which categories or clubs are the same as at SUNY-Buffalo? Click on "Cultural/ Ethnic Clubs". Which terms are preferred by the students in these clubs?