The Internet. David Hardisty

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      David Eastment taught English in Japan and Italy before starting to specialize in the early 1980s in the application of computers to language learning. He worked for many years with the Bell Language Schools in Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies for Information Technology. He has run workshops and seminars in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, and has written and lectured extensively on the problems and the opportunities presented by the new technology. David now works as a freelance teacher, teacher trainer, and consultant. From 1994 to 1999 he was editor of Issues, the Newsletter of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He is the author of The Internet and ELT, a report for The British Council published by Summertown Publishing.

      Alan Maley worked for The British Council from 1962 to 1988, serving as English Language Officer in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, and China, and as Regional Representative in South India (Madras). From 1988 to 1993 he was Director-General of the Bell Educational Trust, Cambridge. From 1993 to 1998 he was Senior Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. He is currently a freelance consultant and Director of the graduate programme at Assumption University, Bangkok. Among his publications are Literature, in this series, Beyond Words, Sounds Interesting, Sounds Intriguing, Words, Variations on a Theme, and Drama Techniques in Language Learning (all with Alan Duff), The Mind’s Eye (with Françoise Grellet and Alan Duff), Learning to Listen and Poem into Poem (with Sandra Moulding), and Short and Sweet. He is also Series Editor for the Oxford Supplementary Skills series.

      Introduction

      Who is the book for?

      This book is intended for language teachers who have at least some experience of working with computers, either for their personal use or for language teaching. However, since our Activities assume differing amounts of computer expertise, whether your computing experience is great or small, you will find ideas in the book that you can use.

      The aims of the book

      Although they have been used for teaching since the 1960s, computers only became practical and affordable for language learning in the early 1980s, when relatively inexpensive personal computers first became available. The first Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programs were mainly used for manipulating words and sentences, playing games with students, testing them, and giving them feedback on their performance. Used in this way the computer has often been described as the ‘medium of the second chance’ (because the activities usually let you try more than once to get an answer right) and of risk-taking (because you can make mistakes in your answers without other students knowing). We feel that both descriptions can be applied to activities on the Internet.