Филологические науки/1. Методика  преподавания языка и литературы

Рябуха Т. В.

Мелитопольский государственный педагогический университет

имени Богдана Хмельницкого

The internet as a source of information

in English Language Teaching

The internet is probably one of the richest sources of information which is readily available just a search or two away. One can find practically any information in online encyclopedias, dictionaries, articles, blogs, news archives, online versions of newspapers, journals and virtual libraries.

However, this availability means that the information comes from all sorts of sources and needs to be thoroughly checked before using it in the classroom.

First of all, if you decide to use a website for teaching, it needs to be checked for credibility. Normally, there is a big difference in the degree of credibility between an article on language written, say, by the world-renown expert David Crystal and the views of a tourist expressed in a travel blog. Some information can be biased depending on the views of the owner of the site. Thus, some websites are used to promote the views of a religious, or a financial or a political group and therefore may not be acceptable for teaching children. To find out who the owner of a website is you may look for copyright notices at the bottom of the page or the owner's contact information.

Even when the information on a website is edited publicly, there are chances that its credibility is not so well-established. Wikipedia — the publicly-edited online encyclopedia — can be used as a good example of this statement. Since the information in Wikipedia can be edited by any of its readers who wish to do so, every article can undergo minor changes at any time. Although research shows that most of the information in Wikipedia is fairly accurate, in some articles not only the details are different, but also the attitude to those details is influenced by the attitudes of those who wrote and edited those articles. Therefore it is always a good idea to check this information in other sources like Encyclopedia Britannica or others.

Reliability is another issue to look for in information from the internet. Even though the source of information itself is credible, the information may not be very reliable simply due to the fact that it is outdated. For example, if the information on a website has not been updated for 3-5 years, it may already be too old to be reliable. So looking for the date of the last update to the website is always a good idea.

Apart from checking a website's credibility and reliability, the information needs to be selected according to how suitable it is for the class on conceptual, linguistic and pedagogical levels. If the information is too complex for the students to understand the ideas, it would hardly be suitable to use in class unless some preliminary work is done by the teacher. Likewise, a piece of information can be too difficult linguistically for the students to understand, or, although seemingly interesting, will not add much to the flow and the overall objectives of the lesson.

Still, even if some piece of information is too difficult conceptually and language-wise but can be useful for reaching the objectives of the lesson, there are some techniques that a teacher can use to easify work with this information.

Here are some differences in arranging classroom work with information when it is printed out from a website and in working with information online. In the following table possible ways of overcoming the conceptual, linguistic and pedagogical difficulties of information from websites are enlisted:

Issues	Work with printouts	Online work
Conceptual difficulty	Using pre- teaching, explanation of concepts before starting work with the texts, using warming-up to relate the ideas from the texts to the students' personal experience and interests.	Using pre-teaching, explanation of concepts before starting work with the texts, using warming-up to relate the ideas from the texts to the students' personal experience and interests, providing links to online encyclopaedias.
Linguistic difficulty	Breaking the text into smaller chunks, numbering paragraphs and designing tasks and exercises for each paragraph, designing tasks for different types of reading, using a glossary to help students understand difficult words without having to learn them by heart.	Providing links to online dictionaries and encyclopedias, asking questions on certain bits of information from the webpage, illustrating new words by providing links to pictures online, assisting students with internet search.
Pedagogical difficulty	Presenting the information as a fun activity, something which is interesting to learn about even if not directly related to students' personal goals, using the information to arrange a reading for pleasure activity or as a time-filler, focusing on ways of organising information inside the text rather than working with detailed understanding of information from the text.	The goals of the lesson shift from working with information to understand it and pick up new vocabulary and grammar as well as ideas to working with the internet as a source of information, for example: "On this webpage you will find information about… Find additional information to complete the table on the handouts" — an exercise based on information gap may help students to build information literacy and help us in our further work with the internet.

So, as we see, the methodology of working with online information versus printouts is slightly different, although essentially it serves the same purpose and alongside with the main work on building language proficiency, allows us to develop students' information skills.