Web-based Activity Types
Kevin Ryan, Showa Women's University
http://kevinryan.com
As HTML grows and matures, its capabilities increase, allowing for greater variety of activities in language learning. About two months ago I set out to discover what kinds of activities were being used by course developers on the Web. This was the initial stage of a project to develop supplementary material for an ESP CALL course.
In this article I hope to lead you to sites that have different, interesting activity types. This is not a comprehensive review. I don't think such a thing is possible on the Web. Since this article has so many links, I have made a Web based version of this article off of my home page at http://kevinryan.com to make linking easier.
Most commercial sites, those that charge for use of the Web site as part of a program, had demonstration sections. Most of these demonstrations were inadequate for evaluation purposes. One notable exception was a course out of Barcelona at International House, the place where I had my first ESL training more than 20 years ago (see number 1 below).
What follows is a catalog of the most interesting sites I found in my month of searching. They are in no particular order.
1) http://www.netlanguages.com/samples/level3/unit1/contents.htm
Net Languages puts it all together. (If you're going to go to any site mentioned in this
article, go to this one). It is the best example of an all-around course based on Web
technology. The site is broken into four areas; a study room, a library, a cafe, and a
teacher's room. The demonstration has about 16 different activity types, most of which we
will cover here by using other examples with other links.
2) http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/resources/TESOL/www_activities.html
(2) Heidi Shetzer gives three examples of Web activities as input for writing; The Class
Home Page Scavenger Hunt, Add-a-Link, General Reading/Writing Activity. All three of these
involve creating a Web page. Ann Salzmann uses the Web as a corpus for exploring grammar
individually and in research groups using controversial topics. Volker Hegelheimer
outlines opposing cons of using the Web as a forum for communication. Douglas Mills
provides a typical example of using the Web for collaborative language study.
3) http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/visitors/kenji/kitao/art-use.htm
Kenji and Kathleen Kitao give a good overall introduction to using the web for language
teaching and learning, from both the teacher and student viewpoints.
4) http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/LCRA/2++/
This page features an "interactive" listening activity that is more of a classic
exercise with a Real Audio clip. You predict, listen and answer. There is additional
support in the form of a glossary.
5) http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/words/index.htm
This is a somewhat more technologically primitive listening site from the BBC (text plus
sound), which uses recent news reports as a basis for the content.
6) http://www.esl-lab.com/
Three different listening activities similar to (4) in Randall's Cyber Listening Lab. I
think he is in the process of adding a fourth, with scrolling text along with the audio,
using Real Audio's new features in their newest release, G2. (see detailed reviews on
pages 11-13 ).
7) http://www.lang.uiuc.edu/r-li5/book/MKFRND.html
Read the conversation, click to hear each sentence. The activities, from Rong-Chang Li,
are crude but relatively quick.
8) http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/exchange/
This online magazine for ESL students has a lot of easier content on current events, along
with discussion groups (web-based, not listserv).
9) http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
The Online Writing Lab, a great resource for writers, has ways to ask native speaker
experts questions about writing in English.
10) http://www.englishlistening.com/
English Listening has unscripted stories in Real Audio with three sets of activities, for
beginning, intermediate and advanced learners.
11)http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_Languages/Languages/Specific_Languages/English
/English_as_a_Second_Language/Language_Schools/Distance_Learning/
A list of seven schools that offer EFL by Distance learning at Yahoo. Most of these have
demos.
12) http://www.privateacher.com/tour_try.html
Private Teacher has a spiffy demo that uses a lot of Shockwave. There's not a lot of
information, but it's very slick.
13) http://www.esonow.com/business.html
English School Online is a good example of how NOT to do a distance course in ESL. It
lacks a coherent layout and has some rather outdated ideas about language teaching.
14) http://www.englishpractice.com/
English Practice is a free site to practice English. On the whole, the site is relatively
unremarkable, but do click on the dictionary; that is worth checking out.
15) http://surf2school.com/english/
This is the site of A small school in Canada that has taken a textbook (New Interchange)
and developed a web course around it, then charges a lot of money. It uses video
interaction through Microsoft Netmeeting.
16) http://www.wordskills.com/courses/ncondets
From Finland, this is another small operation doing courses using NetPhone on how to
negotiate online with teleconferencing.
Kevin Ryan, Showa Women's University