Annual Students' Online Conference: Lyulkun Nina

N.A.Lyulkun

Khmelnitskiy National University

Use of Internet Tools with EFL Students

I have an intention to let you know about the various synchronous and asynchronous web tools for learning and teaching EFL. By chance I had an opportunity to participate in a 6 week workshop online with hundreds of educators from around the world.

A bit about the online community which has existed since 2002. It is 'Webheads in Action' - a five-year-old community of practice of language teachers worldwide, coordinated by Vance Stevens. The community explore Web communication tools and share the best ways of using them in teaching practices, engage with students in virtual classes, collaborate on projects, and participate in conferences as audience and presenters. This collaboration takes place online, as we are all geographically apart. Would you like to become one of this community? Join at Yahoo Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/baw07/ Wiki: http://baw07.pbwiki.com/

In the course of the 6 weeks, participants learned collaboratively and hands on:

used various synchronous and asynchronous web tools for learning and teaching EFL,
interacted through e-mail, text chat, voice chat, voice e-mail, and distribution lists, among others,
reflected on ways of applying those tools to their teaching, either online or face to face, and,
created web pages and blogs, online worksheets, surveys, interactive exercises and rubrics related to our own contexts.

Weekly chats were held to discuss content and pre-defined topics, build rapport [rx'pLt] and create a sense of community.

Former and very active BaW (Becoming a Webheads) participants, some of whom are now active members of Webheads in Action, moderated the 6 weeks of the session.

Much of the content derived from the discussions made available through a wiki created during the six weeks, which are kept online for future references. (http://baw07.pbwiki.com/ ) At the end of the session participants invited to join the Webheads in Action (WiA) community of practice.|

One of the online tools the participants explored was Weblog, or blogging as a process.

Moving on to the purpose of this report I'd like to introduce three ways that weblogs can be used to support EFL classroom learning. Defining what a weblog is, I should say that it is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the educational, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and thoughts.

Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:

A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
An archive of older articles.
A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a "blogroll".

Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.

Speaking about the Blog content, it should be mentioned that on a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called "posts" or "entries") that the author writes. Yes, some blogs have multiple authors, each writing his/her own articles. Typically, blog authors compose their articles in a web-based interface, built into the blogging system itself. Some blogging systems also support the ability to use stand-alone "weblog client" software, which allows authors to write articles offline and upload them at a later time.

If you like to make an interactive website, it would be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, tips or impressions about the site or a specific article? With blogs, they can do that! Posting comments is one of the most exciting features of blogs. Most blogs have a method to allow visitors to leave comments.

The Difference Between a Blog and CMS?

Software that provides a method of managing your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Many blogging software programs are considered a specific type of CMS. They provide the features required to create and maintain a blog, and can make publishing on the Internet as simple as writing an article, giving it a title, and organizing it under (one or more) categories. While some CMS programs offer vast and sophisticated features, a basic blogging tool provides an interface where you can work in an easy and, to some degree, intuitive manner while it handles the logistics involved in making your composition presentable and publicly available. In other words, you get to focus on what you want to write, and the blogging tool takes care of the rest of the site management.

1. The Tutor Blog. This of weblog is run by the tutor for the learners. It serves the following purposes:

− It gives daily reading practice to the learners. Entries are kept short, pointed towards the learner interest, and linked to related online sources for further reading if desired. Vocabulary used in class can be recycled this way. New vocabulary words can be linked to definitions on other sites found with a search engine.

− It promotes exploration of English websites. Any entry made by the tutor can and ought to encourage further exploration of the Internet in English by linking to related articles, and content based websites. For those learners who feel dis'comfort of exploring the Web in their native language, being led to interesting English language sites will increase their confidence and help to overcome their self-consciousness.

− It encourages online verbal exchange by use of comment buttons. At the bottom of each entry, any blog reader can make a comment that can be read and further commented on by all who access the site. The tutor asking their students questions, challenge their views, encourage them to comment.

− It provides class or syllabus information. Entries in the blog can also serve to remind students about homework assignments and upcoming discussion topics. Links can be provided to sites that introduce relevant topics of discussion. The tutor can also follow up on difficult areas of classroom work that might need review or clarification. In addition, a permanent link to the classroom syllabus and rules can be included on the blog.

− It serves as a resource of links for self-study. In the right and/or left margins of the blog, permanent links can be set-up and organized to aid the learner in self-study, for example links to online quizzes, English news sites, key-pal networks, audio and video files for listening practice and EFL interactive websites.

2. The Learner Blog. These are blogs that are either run by individual learners themselves or by small collaborative groups of learners. In EFL, learner blogs may be best suited for reading and writing classes. A common reading assignment can be followed by blog postings on the thoughts of each learner or group of learners. Furthermore, the act of constructing the blog may encourage the use of search engines and net surfing in English to find the appropriate sites to which links can be made. This will empower the learner to direct the reader to sites of choice for further reading. Individually, blogs can be used as journals for writing practice, or as free-form templates for personal expression. The idea here is that students can get writing practice, develop a sense of ownership, and get experience with the practical, legal, and ethical issues of creating a hypertext document. In addition, whatever they write can instantly be read by anyone else and, due to the comment features of the software, further exchange of ideas is promoted.

3. The Class Blog. This type of blog is the result of the collaborative effort of an entire class. The following are some possible uses:

- It could be used like a free-form bulletin ['bVlqtIn] board for learners to post messages, images, and links related to classroom discussion topics. It could also be a space for them to post thoughts on a common theme assigned for homework.

- It might also be useful for facilitating project-based language learning, where learners can be given the opportunity to develop research and writing skills by being asked to create an online resource for others.

- Class blogs could also be used as a virtual space for an international classroom language exchange. In this scenario, learners from different countries would have joint access and publishing rights to the blog. The entire exchange would then be transparent to all readers and could be followed and commented on by other learners, tutors, and friends.

By introducing the three types of weblogs above and mentioning the software necessary, it is needed to draw your attention to both the potential that weblogs have to support classroom-based EFL learning and the ease with which an EFL blogging project could be started.

What do students say about blogging themselves.?

ESL/EFL practitioners use weblogs for a number of purposes, and have students use them for a number of reasons also. With over 70 million weblogs in the world already, any given class or group of weblogs may not by itself make a huge mark on the world of the media itself, but should better be seen in terms of its influence on its students, and the objectives of the particular class. Teachers considering using weblogs must consider its benefits to a given class, given its objectives, and weigh those against the time constraints of learning a new medium and of presenting and explaining the concept of weblogs to students, who may be reluctant to use them, or bring any range of computer skills into the classroom.

Weblogs have changed the media, and the world, in the last ten years (Farber, 2007). A good introductory explanation can be found in Leach (2006); a crash course in Wood (2002); an overview in some of my materials below. Most people today have some idea of what weblogs are and of how much work it would take to set one up and get students started on them. Teachers tend to wonder about the value of putting intermediate or low-level work in public view, being naturally protective of their students; they also tend to be careful of use of time, and aware that a situation heavy on instructions and practical considerations can be dragged out for long periods of time in lower-level classes.

Why weblogs work

First, they are appealing to our students, partly because of their nature.

1. They are vibrant, personal, immediate, multidimensional, and appealing to the young;

2. They give students personal space to present their work to the public; students can and do fix up and personalize this space, and thus enjoy presenting their writing more.

3. Weblogs' recurring now-on-top nature and editing capabilities offer them a sense of control over their language and image management;

A second line of argument is that a real audience is good for writers and provides real feedback.

4. They offer students the ultimate audience: young, hip, no expectations, tolerant of diversity and grammatical errors, willing to interact and comment if so moved;

5. The pure size of the blogosphere offers some anonymity; it allows them to feel that they have joined a large group (70 million) of people expressing themselves in the wide-open electronic marketplace of ideas;

6. Our students' opinions have intrinsic value; having thought about an issue, and worked hard on the expression of their ideas, they deserve the benefit of seeing them influence the English-speaking world's discussion of issues, and can thus enjoy the fruits of their labor.

A third line looks at the new technology coming to dominate our students' lives, careers, and futures, and seeks to show that moving toward using weblogs will give them advantages in the future.

7. If more communication is done in the future through this medium, we should be using this medium in order to prepare our students' writing skills for adapting to the environments they will need in their futures;

8. Weblogs give students opportunities to learn technological skills that will be important to their futures;

Finally, some look at the writing class itself and notice that weblogs can be of special use with traditional aims of that class, most specifically, finding and dealing with online plagiarism, and getting students to read and interact with each other's work.

9. They give the writing teacher a fresh approach to the topic of plagiarism, higher stakes in the battle against it, and more tools with which to wage that battle;

10. They help a class establish a sense of community, such that members know each other better, and have more of a chance to learn more about each other, given the difficulty each experiences in absorbing information about anything in English, regardless of how interesting it is or how closely related to themselves it may be;

11. Work published earlier, by other students, provides useful role models, as well as the exercise of learning from previous work without copying it. Those earlier students are, in fact, the best role models for our students, having faced the same challenges, and succeeded in overcoming them.

I hope with this to establish that weblogs will help students with their writing in specific ways, related to fluency, skills, and integration:

12. Fluency is, in essence, ease of communication in a particular environment; writing in fact encompasses both ink-and-paper, and lab-printed products. Weblogs deal with a third: permanently published online material; this kind becomes increasingly important as time goes by.

13. Since fluency can be defined in terms of the environment and media being used to communicate, a wider definition of fluency than is normally accepted could state that for students' futures (see arguments 7 and 8), a certain ease with computers, specifically with keyboards, electronic file transfer, chat media, and similar environments, will unquestionably be essential in our students' future. Weblogs place students in a managable but distinct representative threshold of that environment, and provide a place where they can explore (with help, usually in a new language) this environment safely and with guidance.

14. The process of setting up a weblog, connecting it in various places, and functioning with it regularly develops a number of skills;

15. The crucial skills of evaluating websites and searching successfully for desired material can be taught directly and overtly;

16. The process of actively and regularly linking to what one is referring to develops a number of useful skills.

17. The comments provided for each post can turn a given weblog entry into a webpage itself, thus making a site that effectively revolves on the main point of the post, though nothing prevents commenters from going off on tangents. This in effect gives every opinion a venue, and provides every opinion a single vote in a democratic blogosphere; this is empowering to a struggling writer.

There are certainly more benefits, but this presentation hopes only to enlarge and expand on the latter ones.

Thank you for attention! Any questions?