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Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>
tzm.uni-giessen.de>Dear subscribers of the LINGUIST list, As a part of my doctoral thesis, I am doing some work on Internet tools used to teach and to learn foreign languages. In order to contact as many as possible providers of such teaching tools I would like to ask you, if you would be able to send me all the Internet addresses of any online language course you may know of. I enclose the questionnaire which will be sent to these providers, so that you can fill it in, if you yourself are a supplier of online courses. I would also be very grateful, if you could forward this questionnaire to the online providers you know. If anybody out there knows something about a similar inquiry, please let me know about. Thank you for any effort taken. Here follows my questionnaire: ------------------------------------------------------- It would be a considerable help for my current work, if you were so kind as to answer to this questionnaire. I will send the same questionnaire to many language course providers on the Internet and my offer is to provide you all with the analysis of the feedback which I obtain. Perhaps you are also interested in how "successful" the suppliers of other courses and other languages are. You could integrate the wishes of the end-users into your own applications, and I would be able to write the respective part of my scientific work based on this survey... The aim of this work is neither to evaluate the interesting work which you are realizing nor to publish your details. The results of this survey will be used ANONYMOUSLY and as such will be sent to anybody interested in the statistical analysis of your answers! I would be very grateful to everybody who answers the following questions. If you do not want to answer all questions (some of them may not even seem suitable for all contacted providers, but must be maintained in order to compare the answers) feel free to choose the suitable ones. Please do not hesitate to add further comments! Since when have you been offering your language course on the Internet? Is this the first/second/third... version of the course? If you have updated your course, have you realized a technical and / or a didactical change? Was the change rather an intuitive decision (in order to improve something that you considered not to be "perfect") or was the update due to the wishes / the feedback of your learners? What kind of "experts" were engaged in building up the course design? (programmers, language teachers, didactic specialists...) What is their mother tongue? Do you analyse the demographic data of the persons who are using your language course? Do you know how many regular learners you have? Do you know how many persons have consulted your offer and how many of them continue to use it? Where do they come from? What is the age / the gender / the educational background of your learners? What is their motivation for using the Internet instead of traditional teaching? What kind of feedback tools do you offer to your learners? (i.e. technical / grammatical / didactical support) What is the teaching language of your course (it seems to be mainly English)? Are you thinking of offering other teaching languages than the current one? What kind of exercises do you offer? Who has built them up (technicians or rather language teachers)? Do you change them regularly? Is your course designed in teaching units? Do learners have to use your course online or are they able to download it? If they can download it, do they have the same functions on their own PC when they are "offline"? Do you supply other language teaching software? Do you use "real" texts / "authentic" texts of the target language or do you use specialized grammatical instructive texts? Do you offer / will you offer a tutor support for the teaching? Do you or will you offer sound files of native speakers in order to explain the phonology of the target language? Do you or will you use real sound applications (i.e. through the Internet or by the "traditional phone")? Do you intent to expand / change your teaching offers? - technically (i.e. offering language teaching through ISDN-connections, videoconfering, etc.), - in terms of quantity (more or other teaching / target languages, more exercises, etc.)? - Will you individualize your offer for special target groups? Would you accept a link from the Webpage where you offer your language course to an interactive questionnaire for your learners on our Webserver (at an institution of University of Giessen, Germany, where by the way no language course is offered through the Internet)? Before I do the work to create a suitable questionnaire which will store the answers of your learners in an ACCESS database, I would like to know, if you would support such a survey. Do you want to add further comments? Are you interested in obtaining the results of this survey? Thank you very much for answering to all these questions! Yours sincerely, Claus Steiger email: Claus.A.SteigerMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue