LINGUIST List 12.2820

Sat Nov 10 2001

Review: Windeatt et al., The Internet

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Juris G. Lidaka, Windeatt, Hardisty & Eastment, The Internet

Message 1: Windeatt, Hardisty & Eastment, The Internet

Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 09:24:51 -0500 (EST)
From: Juris G. Lidaka <lidakaoscar.wvsc.edu>
Subject: Windeatt, Hardisty & Eastment, The Internet

Windeatt, Scott, David Hardisty, and David Eastment (2000) The Internet. Oxford University Press, viii+136pp, paperback ISBN 0-19-437223-5, Resource Books for Teachers series.

Juris G. Lidaka, West Virginia State College

The title of this book is deceptive, especially when its small size is considered. It is not some unspecified description or history of the internet, but what the series' name indicates: It is a resource book for teachers, specifically for those who teach English to those who do not primarily speak the language. It assumes its readers are able to use computers, but not much more, and issues the standard warnings about the semi-chaotic free range of materials that browsing the web can lead to, though perhaps not enough about the web as the ultimate vanity press.

After a general introduction with discussion of how to use the book, there are three core chapters subdivided into many activities, with six (or seventeen, potentially more) appendices, followed by a list of other books in this series before the index to this book, a peculiar order. Usefully, the table of contents indicates chapter and section titles, skill level assumed for the students, and the estimated time for the activities, as well as pages. In the chapters themselves, large marginal glosses highlight aspects of each activity, such as the level and time already mentioned, but also aims of the activity, technical requirements, student knowledge, teacher preparation -- almost universally a reference to "Appendix E ('Activity links', page 121)" and a reference to the book's web site http://www.oup.com/elt/rbt.internet -- and procedure.

What is not particularly obvious is why activities do not proceed from lowest to highest levels of students; that is, the very first section of the first chapter indicates skill levels in this order: Intermediate and above, All, All, and Elementary and above. However, it is not the language skills that are a concern here but the logic of the activities: students must use a search engine to find something, then use it more effectively for targeted searching, and finally organize saved bookmarks (Netscapespeak) or favorites (Microsoft Internet Explorerspeak) that result from those searches. It would not be hard to quibble with the trade-offs between skill levels assumed and organization or activity.

The first chapter, "Core Internet Skills," covers searching and sorting, evaluating, and communicating. The nature of the first bit is indicated above. Evaluating covers appearance and design of sites, followed by contents of news sites based first on their headlines and then on the articles, with a closing glance at critical evaluation. Communicating means lurking on a discussion list and discovering netiquette, sending electronic greeting cards, and sending e-mail to lists.

The second chapter, "Focus on Language," covers electronic dictionaries or thesauri, word puzzles, weather, finding help with emergencies and currency conversion, employment, weddings, grammatical errors, discourse markers, verb tenses, reported speech, and making questions. This is quite a grab-bag, but it lends itself to further ideas a teacher might have.

Third is "Focus on Language Skills," not apparently different from the previous chapter, but filled with very many activities broadly categorized into writing, reading (yes, in that order), listening, speaking, all of the above, and finally translating. Activities include creating home pages, writing Valentine's Day verses, messaging via IRC (internet relay chat), following cooking and other instructions, listening to news and audiobooks, talking about the supernatural, telling jokes and stories, reviewing books and performances, examining machine translation, translating texts, and practicing simultaneous translation.

The appendices are a glossary, a subdivided discussion of the web, one of other forms of electronic contact (e-mail, lists, MOOs, BBSs, etc.), another of "Internet resources," an unsubdivided (in the table of contents) one of "Activity links" for the three main chapters, and a short bibliography. The links for activities will be most often used and are keyed to chapter and section, but it would have been far more useful in the chapters to point directly at the page, since the appendix is eleven pages in all and the constant references to "Appendix E ('Activity links', page 121)" become tedious, given the growing need for flipping pages beyond page 121, while proceeding through the book.

As mentioned above, there is a related web site with updates every three months (apparently not in practice, since the latest date, not placed on all pages, is 15 Sept. 2000). Though worksheets for the activities are clearly labelled in the book as "photocopiable" yet copyrighted by OUP, the web site includes them in Microsoft Word *.doc format, which should be easier for teachers to work with if they have Word (I prefer not to); if it is Word 6, Word 97, or Word 2000; if they are on some Windows platform; and if they know how to download the files and find the downloads on their hard drives. Teachers using Apple or Linux machines, or others, may write for RTF, HTML, or other versions, but these will be perforce translations and may require considerable review. Fortunately, at least Word 98 on a Mac will read the files.

It is this situation at the end, just as that at the start, that gives me pause: how computer-literate the teacher (and at times the student) really must be. Much of this book is basic enough that just about any user can perform the tasks, yet some parts are far more complicated or difficult than they are presented as. For example, the activity on organizing bookmarks/favorites requires that the teacher prepare a bookmark/favorite file and wisely urges that this file be backed up somewhere so it can be copied onto more than one computer for multiple students and multiple classes.

I do not doubt that most web surfers have by now made such files, but experience has convinced me that very few know the names and locations of those files. Will they be able to install such a file on multiple computers in a lab, and will they be able to restore the original files on those very lab computers? The activity is far from being as simple as implied, and it will probably take much more time and effort than is indicated in the activity (1.4, pp. 32-33) or in the cross-referenced discussion of bookmarks/favorites (pp. 22-23), which gives the filename for Netscape bookmarks (but not its location) and the foldername for Explorer favorites (but not its location). There are default locations for these, but those can change depending on the version of the web browser and on the person installing or setting it up, as well as the platform (Windows, Apple, Linux, etc.). On some systems, access to system files and even settings may be limited to administrators, as well, so lab users or teachers may not be able to save or restore anything without additional effort.

Similarly, one task is for students to create a home page (3.1, pp. 67-68); required knowledge includes, of course, the teacher's needing to know to create and publish web pages, so attention is directed to Appendix B4 'Writing Web pages.' The discussion there is good for those more experienced, but the very first method will lead the inexperienced astray very quickly, since it says that you, the teacher, can use

any word-processor or text-processor (such as Windows Notepad): type in the HTML codes yourself, and then save the page with the extension .htm or .html.

That will work with a text editor like Notepad, but the danger is that most teachers are going to go with the first bit of advice: a word-processor. That is likely to mean Microsoft Word, and saving with that extension will not do the trick -- there is more involved. Even explaining how to do it in Word means a much longer, more complicated and off-putting text, and that will come at the expense of the simplicity desired.

These are minor points given the glorious variety of exercises and ideas posed in this short book, so I regret going on about them for so long, but I wish more balance could have been achieved between simplicity to help teachers get into using the ideas and fullness of explanation so they really can use the ideas. The many suggestions, with planning tips and estimates of time, will be very valuable to L2 teachers. The web is a tool, and The Internet is an excellent treasury of suggestions for using it to help students learn English.