Hwa Kang Journal of TEFL May 2002

TEACHERS' HOMEPAGES AND TESOL
Building Upon Preconceptions and Perceptions

KENNETH J. DICKSON

ABSTRACT

This study examines the different perceptions between students and teachers of the purpose of ESL teachers' homepages. It creates and administers a short survey of students' expectations with regard to teachers' homepages. The results are analyzed and the 10 top categories of interest to students are selected. These top 10 represent 65 percent of the total preferences expressed by the students. Then 201 websites, from a well-known ESL directory on the Internet, are examined to find out whether the webpages provide content and interaction that meet the expressed needs of students. Findings highlighted both how the nature and extent of the differences between expectations of teachers and their student visitors. In conclusion, recommendations for teachers are made for teachers wanting to develop their own website as well as for areas of further research.

Introduction 
With typical class sizes increasing in many parts of the world, teacher-student and student-student contact during class time faces increasing pressure. The integration of the Internet into teaching may offer a practical solution by increasing out-of-class opportunities for several kinds of student-based interaction through email, web page projects, chat, and MOOs projects, homepages and so on.

The advent of the World Wide Web provides a great opportunity for teachers to create new and varied avenues of interaction with their students. This medium allows for creating content and interaction between students and teacher (Dickson), and creates an opportunity for students to develop at a speed more suited to their own individual preferences. Although homepages have been around since the early days of the World Wide Web with some of the best TESOL websites, such as Dave's ESL Cafe, starting from the efforts of teachers to harness the World Wide Web, only recently have teachers increasingly begun turning to the web and developing their own homepages in significant numbers. Little work, however, has been done to research these homepages and whether they are in any sense providing material and content of interest to students.

So this study examines the perceptions between students and teachers of the purpose of ESL teachers' homepages. It initially creates and administers a short survey of students' expectations with regard to teachers' homepages. The results are analyzed and the ten top categories of interest to students are selected. These top ten represent 65 percent of the total preferences expressed by the students. 

Two hundred one websites are provided from a well-known ESL directory on the Internet. These are examined to determine whether they offer content and interaction that meet the expressed needs of students. Recommendations are then given for teachers wanting to develop their own website as well as for areas of further interest in terms of research.

Literature Review
"Technology itself does not determine human behavior, such as how we teach. However it does create the possibilities for new forms of behavior and of education" (Warschauer, 2001). There is a significant body of evidence that addresses the use of webpages for projects created by students, but almost nothing can be found that addresses specifically the creation of webpages by teachers for students and the reactions of students to those webpages. However, any attempt to examine this issue needs to look at both the students and the teachers themselves.

Students' Technology Environments and Their Attitudes to Technology
CyberAtlas showed that out of Taiwan's population of 22.3 million, over 6.5 million were users and over 5 million were classed as 'active' users. iamasia even more recently pegged domestic Internet penetration in Taiwan at around 31percent. Given the relatively young population with 22 percent of the population being under 14, according to a recent report published by Tradeport, both of these numbers suggest there is still a large potential for the development of the Internet in Taiwan in general and in education, particularly (National Trade Data Bank qtd. in Tradeport).

In the United States, generally considered to be further down the road of the computerizing both schools and the home, "According to a recent report, published by the U.S. Census Bureau, 'Nine of every 10 school-age children (ages 6 to 17) had access to a computer in 2000, with two-thirds having computer access at home and 80 percent using a computer at school. Sixty-five percent of children ages 3 to 17 lived in a household with a computer in 2000, compared to 55 percent in 1998. About three in 10 children used the Internet at home in 2000, up from two in 10 in 1998'" (quoted in CyberAtlas). With the increasing prevalence of computers and the rapid rise of high-speed Internet connections in Taiwan, society here seems to follow closely the model provided by the United States.

Moreover, Schoepp notes that the Internet tends to increase and enhance student levels of motivation when they are learning English and using the Internet as part of their study. In Schoepp and Erogul's study of Turkish EFL students' behavior and use of the information technology outside the classroom, they highlighted that on average their students spent 10.9 hours per week on the Internet using English out of an estimated 13.5 hours of total computer time in English. Moreover, "In response to the statement computer technology at the University has enhanced my English language learning, 78 (86.5 percent) of students either agreed or strongly agreed." (5/9).

Moreover, Hao-Jan Howard Chen's recent experiment in creating an online language laboratory at National Taiwan Ocean University was both innovative and challenging. This experiment found that students were "very interested in learning more about the Internet and Web resources which might help them to improve their command of English. They feel that the virtual language lab is very convenient. They no longer need to go to the physical lab and they can gain access to the lab anytime they like." (28)

Overall, these factors of students increasingly having easy access to computer technology and Internet access at both home and school, positive attitudes to both the technology and English-related Internet, and a strong willingness to make use of the technology create a valuable opportunity for ESL teachers.

Teachers and the WWW
The invention of the browser gave the Internet a much more attractive face for educators with its multimedia elements. The possibilities for use as an educational medium were limited only by the imagination of the teachers/designers. Now, development of HTML tools for the everyday user allows even moderately unskilled teachers an opportunity to create their own homepages through a variety of means using tools that are appropriate for their skill levels, whether it be merely 'blogging,' using tools like Yahoo! Groups or Tripod's page creation wizards, or creating personal pages with freeware or commercial software (Dickson). Hoffman notes, too, "Although educators are likely to know what they want to teach, they are frequently unfamiliar with design principles. Nonetheless, designing their own materials is an attractive option and thanks to a number of authoring programs now available, teachers can accomplish this task without having to learn complicated computer languages and programming techniques." (Hoffman)

Furthermore, Warschauer lists seven benefits of including computer-based instruction in a language course as: "multi-modal practice with feedback, individualization in a large class, pair and small group work on projects, either collaboratively or competitively, the fun factor, variety in available resources and learning styles used, exploratory learning with large amounts of language data and real-life skill-building in computer use" (Warschauer). Warschauer and Whittaker go on to suggest that "it is not only a matter of using the Internet to learn English, but also of learning English to be able to function well on the Internet" (27).

Of course, for a teacher who intends to use such technology with her students, Felix warns: "The essential justification for any use of technology has to be the improvement of teaching and learning that it allows, and everything needs to be judged against this requirement" (Felix). Moreover, the teacher should also seek to identify what aims she is pursuing by including the technology as an element in her course of instruction. Warschauer noted in the Internet for English Teachers "Clarifying course goals is ... an important first step towards successful use of the Internet." If this is true of the use of the Internet within the classroom, it is also true of the teacher who is designing their website. (Warschauer)

Limitations
This survey is limited in a number of ways by the students and the teachers who participated in this survey.

i. Students' Sample
The students used in the initial stage of the experiment were composed of 113 students in the Sophomore Year at Chinese Culture University in Taipei City, Taiwan. One class was primarily studying English as non-English students, while the second class was entirely composed of English majors.

  1. Composition. This study was limited in a number ways: the size, age and make-up of the pool of students used in the original students' survey.
  2. Internet Experience. Students may also not all have the same depth of experience of using the Internet. However, since our school enrollment and much student-related administration is carried out via the Internet, the vast majority of students should have some minimal level of competence at the very least. 
  3. Ambiguity of Terms. Some of the terms on the survey paper may have been ambiguous, e.g. what is the difference between "email" and "communication."
  4. English Learning Competence. Students were not asked to express any level of competence in learning English, so their answers may not reflect their actual learning situations or their respective ability levels.

ii. Teachers' Sample
The teachers' sample also had a significant number of limitations: 

  1. Size. Given that the sample had 208 entries and that the current TESL-L membership exceeds 27,000, there is a much larger number of teachers who currently have homepages than are registered here.
  2. Registration. Registration of websites in the directory used was purely voluntary. Many teachers may have been unaware of this directory or not chosen to list their homepage here.
  3. Relevance. There was no overall screening of websites for relevance (several websites had no connection to TESOL). Additionally, despite Kelly's oversight of the directory, the number of links it contains and the mutability of the Internet would limit the amount of checking that could be done to verify websites accuracy, relevance and availability. 
  4. Other Sites Authored But Not Registered. Teachers may have created student-oriented pages that are not linked to their homepages thus they would appear invisible to the casual surfer. These 'orphaned' pages may contain the kind of material students are looking for but be available only to select groups of students (i.e. their own students on internal networks as in the case of the Online Learning Laboratory at National Taiwan Ocean University), thus making them unavailable to the outside world. Teachers may also have authored pages elsewhere as part of their jobs which may not be linked to their homepages directly.
  5. Limited Number of Homepages. The very limited number of homepages investigated, the method of their selection, and the limited survey focusing only on the top ten elements deemed important by students may all have created a bias in the results of the survey.
  6. Other Webpage Issues. Because teachers may compile numerous websites and virtually link them together, it may be difficult to determine authorship of particular pages. This may mean that pages linked may give the appearance of being part of the teachers' homepage, but in fact may be unrelated. Also, pages that have been put up may be extracts from courses, and put up for particular students in teacher's own classes. They may have not been removed or been intended for wider dissemination.
  7. Counting of Pages. Some materials may be counted several times or be counted in one particular category, though they may be listed under other possible headings, such as a complete lesson may have vocabulary AND listening elements as well. In fact, a high number of sites maintained several different types of information.
  8. Site Availability. This study is limited by the one researcher accessing each site sequentially, accuracy regarding the availability or non-availability of a particular site may be suspect. Sites which are not confirmed as having problems, but which subsequently are unavailable, will be counted as unavailable. Due to the complexities of the technology, the underlying reason why this may be so lies outside the scope of this paper. In addition, a number of the pages were at the time the survey was carried out inaccessible, though these will be noted reasons for their unavailability may be hard to find. The page you are looking for might have been removed, have had their name or location changed, or be temporarily unavailable.
  9. 'Depth' of a Site. A last limitation in the data was in the recording of the data of the teachers' webpages. The survey did not investigate the 'depth' of content of a website. If a homepage contained one activity or a hundred, the survey merely recorded the presence of such an activity. Large and small websites were considered of equal weight when the results were recorded.
  10. Qualification of Links. A link to material was not sufficient to warrant a check of the relevant feature. If, however, a link was embedded in a particular exercise, for example, a link to a listening segment on BBC was accompanied by comprehension questions, then that would qualify as relevant. The author had adapted existing resources while creating an educational activity for a student audience. A typical example of this was (find one example from the listening segment) in Listening. However, one category of exceptions to this was in Communication, where a person had linked to a relevant Communication Resource, such as ESL Cafe bulletin board or chat program. A looser standard was applied because developing the resources for communication were usually beyond the competence of most teachers to program themselves, whilst there were already a number of excellent communication resources on the web.

Method
Gathering Initial Data
The directory pages were saved to the researcher's computer on Saturday, September 29, 2001 between 2:23:53 and 2:26:07 PM in five separate pages. The pages themselves were last updated by the site owner, Charles Kelly, on September 29th, 2001, providing 208 links in the directory accessible from the link found at http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/links/TESL/Personal_Pages_of_ESL_Teachers/.

The data was then collated, edited and combined into a single list. Duplicate website references were removed. This created an initial list of 201 websites from the original 208 sites. These seven duplicate sites were caused by their respective entry also including frame references. After consideration, the researcher decided it would be more convenient to use the framed references, as it provided a simpler way of linking to the different pages and easier, clearer navigation. 

Primary Examination of Comments on the Websites
Each of the webmasters/teachers who submitted their pages for the directory was also invited to type in a few comments describing their pages for subsequent viewers at the time of registration of their website. Analysis of these comments produced a list of typical categories of activities found (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1 
Activities, Articles, Assignments, Biographies, Books, Business, CALL, Classes, Communication, Countries, Course, Culture, CV, Dictionary, Education, E Mail, Glossary, Grammar, Humor, Ideas, Information, Internet, Guide, Jobs, Language, Technology, Lessons, Linguistics, Links, Listening, Materials, Online Course, Personal Journal, Presentations, Photographs, Practical Teaching, Projects, Publications, Puzzle, Quizzes, Reading, Research, Resources, Resume, Software, Songs, Speaking, Study Abroad, Studying, Teacher Development, Teachers, Testing, Theory, Tips, Video, Vocabulary, Workshops, Writing.

Further sifting eliminated the TESL-ESL unrelated links, allowing a basic list of typical descriptions to be compiled. Multiple entries were reduced to single entries. This produced a basic grouping of 56 entries. Additional sorting eliminated unnecessary entries to determine those which had a direct relationship with students (See Figure 2) resulting in a total of 30 elements that were of interest to students. This list was subsequently correlated with one found at http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/links/ESL/ which suggested a few other categories of possible interest for students, such as Free Lessons, Games, Help, Idioms and Slang, Internet, Online Textbooks, Penpals, Communicating, Survival English, and Treasure Hunts. Most either overlapped with, or were not directly relevant to, categories already in the survey. The final list was created and added to the survey.

Figure 2 
Activities, Assignments, Biographies, Business Classes, Communication Course, Culture, Dictionary, Grammar, Humor, Internet, Guide, Lessons, Links, Listening, Online Course, Photographs, Projects, Pronunciation, Puzzle, Quizzes, Reading, Software, Songs, Speaking, Study Abroad, Testing, Tips, Vocabulary, Writing.

Student Survey
Three additional questions to determine students' attitudes to using the Internet for learning English, as well as their experience of, and attitude to, visiting their teachers' homepage were provided. Students merely had to indicate a simple Yes/No answer.  For the second part of the survey, using the newly compiled list, students had to select five items they would consider to be the most interesting to help them improve their English on the Internet. Questions in the student survey focused on student perceptions about the value of the Internet as a learning site and actual use of a teacher's website. (See Appendix A). The results of the survey would determine students' priorities with regard to their acquisition of English via the Internet. It was also expected that these survey results would help to determine the nature of the ideal teacher's homepage, and help measure those that were out there already to see if they were providing what students felt they either wanted or needed. Given the limitations of this pilot study, only the top 10 responses were chosen as worthy of interest in the subsequent analysis of the teachers' websites.

Website Survey Method and Problems
During the period 13th to 16th October, 2001, each of the remaining 201 websites was visited to determine the nature of the content. Of the 208 pages originally found on the directory, Kelly recorded 43 websites as having one of three types of basic error: Forbidden Error, Error 500, or Not Found Error. Kelly notes that a Forbidden Error is: "The owner of the page apparently now doesn't allow access." Internet Explorer 5.5. notes: "You might not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials you supplied." For Error 500, Kelly notes: "It may be a good link, but we got an error message the last time we checked." 

Not Found Error is seen as an invitation to correct the link, "Link Check Status = NOT FOUND ERROR Please tell us the new URL, if you know it" with a more suitable hyperlink to a new email message detailing the old address and asking for appropriate input. Internet Explorer noted that many of these pages could not be found or displayed. However, when initially checked, some error messages were discovered to be themselves erroneous. 

Of these 43 websites, 11 were incorrectly recorded and found to be available at the time of checking, one of which had moved and another of which was at least partially available, but the host computer had temporarily prohibited access. Once the survey of all the websites was carried out, the total number of unavailable websites found was actually 49, slightly exceeding the initial estimate.

Table 1: Question One 
Have you ever used the Internet to help you improve your English? (N=113)

Yes 

61

53.98%

No 

52

46.02%

Invalid 

0

0.00%

Table 2: Question Two
Have you ever visited your teacher's homepage on the Internet? (N=113)

Yes 

16 

14.16%

No 

96 

84.96%

Invalid 

1

0.88% 

Table 3: Question Three
Do you think visiting your teacher's homepage on the Internet would help
you learn English in any way? (N=113)

Yes 

103 

91.15%

No 

9

7.96%

Invalid 

1

0.88%

The majority of the students surveyed here indicated that they had indeed used the Internet to improve their English, though this was not a significant majority. While the nature of their particular study was not investigated, it was nonetheless interesting to note the percentage of use. Though nearly 85 percent of students had never visited a teacher's webpage, the researcher was surprised by how strongly they felt that visiting their teacher's homepage with over 91 percent of students implying they would find it beneficial. These statistics are instructive when compared later with the teachers' websites.

From the 113 papers came 548 answers (See Table 4), with three papers ruled invalid due to either too many choices or no selections expressed, while one paper only had three choices selected. Because of the limitations imposed on the data collection it was decided only to select the top 10 criteria for the survey of teachers' websites. However, these items alone accounted for over 65 percent of the total choices expressed by students. The selected items are indicated by an asterisk.

Table 4: 30 Criteria
*Those items selected as the Top 10 criteria for the website survey.

 

Type of Response

Total Responses 

Percentage

1

Listening*

63 

11.50%

2

Songs*

54 

9.85%

3

Reading*

43 

7.85%

4

E-Mail *

38 

6.93%

5

Communication*

32 

5.84%

6

Speaking*

32 

5.84%

7

Vocabulary*

28 

5.11%

8

Humor*

24 

4.38%

9

Course Information*

22 

4.01%

10

Writing* 

21 

3.83%

11

Activities

19 

3.47%

12

Culture

17 

3.10%

13

Business English

16 

2.92%

14

Photographs

16 

2.92%

15

Study Abroad

16 

2.92%

16

Grammar

14 

2.55%

17

Online Course

14 

2.55%

18

 Assignments

13 

2.37%

19

Dictionary

13 

2.37%

20

Classes

10 

1.82%

21

Lessons

1.28%

22

Puzzles

1.28%

23

Quizzes 

6

1.09%

24

Testing

6

1.09%

25

Links 

4

0.73%

26

Tips

4

0.73%

27

Internet Guide

3

0.55%

28

Software

3

0.55%

29

Biographies

2

0.36%

30

Projects

1

0.18%

 

Total 

548 

100%

Results of Website Survey
Table 5: Teachers' Website Results

Area of Interest 

Responses 

Percentage 

Student Ranking

Course Information 

42

27.63%

Reading 

22

14.47%

3

Communication 

16

10.53%

5=

 Vocabulary 

14

9.21%

7

Writing 

7

4.61% 

10

Email 

3.95%

4

Listening

6  

3.95%

1

Songs 

4

2.63%

2

Humor

3

1.97%

8

Speaking

3

1.97%

5=

Total 

123

n/a

n/a

Of the original 201 sites, 49 (24.38 percent) were unavailable when accessed for this survey. A surprising 88 websites (43.78 percent) offered nothing in the top 10 student-selected categories. Only 64 websites (31.84 percent) were responsible for the data produced in the above table, which is a remarkably low level. Moreover, comparing the student preferences with the teacher preferences indicated a large gap in the perception between what was being wanted and what was being delivered, e.g. Course Information, Vocabulary and Writing all ranked in the bottom five among students, but the top five among teachers; while four of the most desired by students, namely Listening, Songs, and Email all ranked in the bottom five among teachers. 

This clearly suggests a major divergence in what teachers perceive as being ideal for a webpage, and the students, of whom over 91 percent expressed a desire to visit their teacher's pages. Teachers are missing a valuable opportunity to reach out to students with their homepages, especially since so many students expressed a desire to visit the homepage of their teacher. 

Discussion
Initial hypotheses regarding the expected content had included, when this survey of teachers' websites was being planned, finding teachers creating material for students on the net, predominantly for vocabulary, other language-related items, and quizzes. Listening and reading skills were expected to play smaller roles. This perhaps would reflect the limitation of the technology and perhaps also the skills of the teachers themselves, as well as the resources that they may have access to create these particular pages. However, the results are quite surprising in three ways:

  1. Teachers do not have students in mind when creating their home pages. Two aspects highlight this: the low number of sites offering any kind of content interesting to students; and the predominance of course information over other possible choices of content.
  2. The high number of students who, despite having never visited their teacher's page, expressed a belief that doing so would help them learn English. They also had stated preferences which emphasized developing language skills over the grammar, vocabulary and quizzes which seemed to predominate teachers' pages. 
  3. In utilizing the Internet for communication, either through message boards, chat, email, or instant messaging, students are significantly more aware of the potential for communication than teachers may have realized. The prevalence of Bulletin Board Systems (real-time chat software systems) and their popularity among students at Chinese Culture University may go some way to explain this bias.

The mismatch between teachers' websites and students' expectations for their homepages is quite pronounced, even where teachers have taken the effort to create a student-oriented website. The reasons for this are unclear, as the survey did not investigate the methods and motivations of the teachers who created the websites.

Conclusion
Practical Aspects
Overall, three particular areas required focus:

  1. Determine and respect your visitors wishes. If the target of your website is students, then accommodating their wishes in the choice of content and overall design of the website is of paramount importance. To determine the nature of your audience and their likely need, it would be practical to carry out a survey of potential visitors to find out what they need and then create a site that fulfills that need. This can be done through an on-line survey, which in itself is another form of interactivity for student visitors.
  2. Keep your content and links fresh. Kelly's Website Guidelines (Kelly) suggested maintaining fresh and relevant content would encourage your visitors to return. Two other ways include: creating communities, since that creates a motivation to return to the website; and introducing interactive elements which will enhance the visitors' experience, i.e. polls, guestbooks, interactive quizzes, etc.
  3. Focus, focus, focus. Kelly also pointed out that a good website has to have a significant focus, for example on one preferably unique area. Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com) is an excellent example of being focused.

Theoretical Implications
This article has examined an aspect of teachers' and students' lives that is becoming increasingly common, and outlined the accompanying potential and problems. Future research should focus being broader in scope so that they can correct any biases that may have entered into the study due to the small sample sizes. Since this was only a pilot study, we need also to undertake a more detailed survey of teachers with their own homepages to find out what motivated them to publish class-related materials online, what kind of content is effective based on their experience, and lastly, how it relates to their classroom instruction, if at all. 

Referring to a previous study done in Egypt, Warschauer (2001) notes "while Egyptian colloquial Arabic is used in much informal chatting and email use, nearly all formal communication by email in Egypt--even between one Egyptian and another--is conducted in English." This surprising fact suggests that as teachers of EFL we need to understand and adopt this technology as a form of electronic literacy in a world where the use of English is increasing dramatically.

Works Cited
Chen, Hao-Jan Howard. "Creating a Virtual Language Lab: An EFL experience at National Taiwan Ocean University." ReCALL. 11:2 (1999), 28.

Dickson, Kenneth. "A Random Walk Along the Information Superhighway Part III: WhatDo You Want to Create?" Hwa Kang Journal of TEFL. 7 (2001), 117-136.

Felix, Uschi. "Virtual language learning: potential and practice." ReCALL 10:1 (1998) 54. Hoffman, Suzanne. "Computers and instructional design in foreign language/ESL instruction." TESOL Journal. 5:2 (Winter 1995-1996). 25-26.

iamasia. "Taiwan." 5 Feb. 2002. <http://www.iamasia.com/country/taiwan/taiwan.cfm 

Internet Explorer 5.5. Microsoft Corporation. 2001.

Kelly, Charles. "Guidelines for Designing a Good Web Site for ESL Students." Internet TESL Journal. VI:3 (March 2000). 5 Feb. 2002. <http://iteslj.org/Articles/Kelly-Guidelines.html

Kelly, Charles. "TESL : Personal Pages of ESL Teachers." 29 Sept. 2002. <http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/links/TESL/Personal_Pages_of_ESL_Teachers>

National Trade Data Bank. U. S. Department of Commerce. 6 May, 1999. Quoted in
"Taiwan" World Factbook. TradePort. 2 Feb. 2002. <http://www.tradeport.org/ts/countries/taiwan/wofact.html

Pastore, Michael. "Computer, net access standard for many Americans." The Big Picture Geographics. CyberAtlas. 6 Sep. 2001. INT Media Group Inc. 2 Feb. 2002. <http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/demographics/article/0,1323, 5901_879441,00.html

Schoepp, Kevin. "Basic Web Design and the World Wide Web: A Content-Based Instruction Course." Teaching English With Technology. 1:4 (2001) 2002. <http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_article4.htm>.

Schoepp, Kevin and Erogul, Murat. "Turkish EFL student's utilization of IT outside the classroom." TEFL Web Journal. 1:1 (2001). 24 Sep. 2001. <http://www.teflweb-j.org/schoepp_erogul.html.

"The world's online populations." The Big Picture Geographics. CyberAtlas. 17 Jan. 2002. INT Media Group Inc. 2 Feb. 2002. <http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geographics/article/0,,5911_151151,00.html>

Warschauer, Mark. "The death of cyberspace and the rebirth of CALL." CALL in the 21st Century. Escuela Superior de Administracion y Direccion de Empresas. Ed. Paul Brett. CD-ROM. Barcelona, Spain. 2001.

Warschauer, Mark and Healy, Deborah. "Computers and language learning: an overview" Language Teaching. 31 (1998), 57-71.

Warschauer, Mark and Whittaker, P. Fawn. "The Internet for English Teaching: Guidelines for Teachers." TESL Reporter. 30:1 (1997), 27-33. 28 Jan. 2002. <http://iteslj.org/Articles/Warschauer-Internet.html.

Appendix A

Student Survey*

Would you like to help your teacher conduct some research? If so, please answer the 
following questions. If not, just return the paper to me.

1. Have you ever used the Internet to help you improve your English?

Yes

No

2. Have you ever visited your teacher's homepage on the Internet?

Yes

No

3. Do you think visiting your teacher's homepage on the Internet would help you in learning English in any way?

Yes

No

4. Circle 5 (five) areas from the following list of items that you would use to help you improve your English if you visited your teacher's homepage.

Activities 

Listening

Assignments 

Online Course

Biographies 

Photographs

Business English 

Projects

Classes 

Puzzle

Communication 

Quizzes

Course Information 

Reading

Culture 

Software

Dictionary 

Songs

E-Mail 

Speaking

Grammar 

Study Abroad

Humor 

Testing

Internet Guide 

Tips

Lessons 

Vocabulary

Links 

Writing

 *This document altered slightly from original for purposes of publication.


Hwa Kang Journal of TEFL, Number 8, 2002, pp. 41-60. Copyright 2002. Language Center, Chinese Culture University.

http://www.hkjtefl.org/2002-Dickson-Teachers.html

Last updated: 06/24/02 11:25:58 PM


Kenneth J. Dickson (homepage) received his Master's Degree in Classical Greek from St. Andrew's University in Scotland, and went on to complete the RSA Certificate Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults. He has been an instructor in Taiwan since 1992, and in 1997 joined the staff of the Chinese Culture University Language Center as an instructor