LEARNING LANGUAGES ONLINE
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Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, wrote in September 1998: "As a language teacher, the web represents a plethora of new resources produced by the target culture, new tools for delivering lessons (interactive Java and Shockwave exercises) and testing, which are available to students any time they have the time or interest — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is also an almost limitless publication outlet for my colleagues and I, not to mention my institution. (…) Ultimately all course materials, including lecture notes, exercises, moot and credit testing, grading, and interactive exercises will be far more effective in conveying concepts that we have not even dreamed of yet."
= CTI Centre for Modern Languages
Since its inception in 1989, the CTI (Computer in Teaching Initiative) Centre for Modern Languages, based in the Language Institute at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, aims to promote and encourage the use of computers in language learning and teaching. The CTI Centre provides information on how computer-assisted language learning (CALL) can be effectively integrated into existing courses. It offers support to language lecturers who are using computers in their teaching, or who wish to use them.
June Thompson, manager of the CTI Centre, wrote in December 1998: "The internet has the potential to increase the use of foreign languages, and our organization certainly opposed any trend towards the dominance of English as the language of the internet. The use of the internet has brought an enormous new dimension to our work of supporting language teachers in their use of technology in teaching."
How about the future? "I suspect that for some time to come, the use of internet-related activities for languages will continue to develop alongside other technology-related activities (e.g. use of CD-ROMs — not all institutions have enough networked hardware). In the future I can envisage use of internet playing a much larger part, but only if such activities are pedagogy-driven. Our organization is closely associated with the WELL project which devotes itself to these issues."
The WELL (Web Enhanced Language Learning) project was a project from EUROCALL (European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning). It ran from 1997 to 2000 in the United Kingdom to provide access to high-quality web resources in 12 languages. The resources were selected and described by subject experts, with information and examples on how to use them for teaching and learning.
More generally, EUROCALL's goal is to promote the use of foreign languages within Europe, to provide a European focus for all aspects of the use of technology for language learning, and to enhance the quality, dissemination and efficiency of CALL materials. Another project of EUROCALL is CAPITAL (Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Investigation Teaching and Learning), run by a group of researchers and practitioners interested in using computers in this field.
= LINGUIST List
The LINGUIST List was founded by Anthony Rodriques Aristar in 1990 at the University of Western Australia, with 60 subscribers, before moving from Australia to Texas A&M University in 1991. In 1997, emails sent to the distribution list were also available on the list's own website, in the following sections: the profession (conferences, linguistic associations, programs), research and research support (papers, dissertation abstracts, projects, bibliographies, topics, texts), publications, pedagogy, language resources (languages, language families, dictionaries, regional information), and computer support (fonts and software). The LINGUIST List is a component of the WWW Virtual Library for linguistics.
Helen Dry, moderator of the LINGUIST List, wrote in August 1998: "The LINGUIST List, which I moderate, has a policy of posting in any language, since it's a list for linguists. However, we discourage posting the same message in several languages, simply because of the burden extra messages put on our editorial staff. (We are not a bounce- back list, but a moderated one. So each message is organized into an issue with like messages by our student editors before it is posted.) Our experience has been that almost everyone chooses to post in English. But we do link to a translation facility that will present our pages in any of five languages; so a subscriber need not read LINGUIST in English unless s/he wishes to. We also try to have at least one student editor who is genuinely multilingual, so that readers can correspond with us in languages other than English."
She added in July 1999: "We are beginning to collect some primary data. For example, we have searchable databases of dissertation abstracts relevant to linguistics, of information on graduate and undergraduate linguistics programs, and of professional information about individual linguists. The dissertation abstracts collection is, to my knowledge, the only freely available electronic compilation in existence."